Carequality interoperability network celebrates 10 years of HIE

Carequality, a national interoperability trusted exchange framework for health information exchange (HIE), is celebrating its tenth anniversary since The Sequoia Project, a nonprofit advocate for nationwide HIE, first launched the initiative.

Carequality became an independent nonprofit organization five years ago. Today, the framework supports the monthly exchange of over 745,000,000 documents across disparate technologies, regions, and networks.

“Whether it’s a kid’s school sports physical or a patient’s complicated disease treatment requiring a team of doctors, every document exchanged represents a patient,” Alan Swenson, Carequality executive director, said in a press release. “Carequality is aggressively expanding access to the clinical information when and where it is needed because lives depend on it.”

After The Sequoia Project first founded Carequality in 2014, it created the Carequality Interoperability Framework one year later, which was adopted by 13 founding organizations.

The framework consists of legal terms, policy requirements, governance, and more to support data sharing among HIE networks, vendors, payers, and other healthcare stakeholders.

On July 1, 2016, the framework facilitated the first exchange of clinical data for treatment purposes between a health system using an Epic EHR system and a clinic using an athenahealth EHR.

Today, Carequality is the nation’s most widely adopted interoperability framework.

Carequality plays a key role in supporting the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC’s) new Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

The Sequoia Project, in its role as the TEFCA Recognized Coordinating Entity (RCE), collaborates closely with Carequality to leverage its knowledge in developing a nationwide, industry-led, trusted exchange framework.

“Our ten years of growth is testament to the support and trust of our implementer community and the dedication of our Carequality team,” Swenson noted. “We look forward to continuing to be a pioneering force in the health IT industry, aiming to advance interoperability nationwide not only for the Carequality community but as we support TEFCA.”

Alongside this milestone, Carequality is also celebrating over five years of being an independent nonprofit. At the time Carequality separated from The Sequoia Project, it had shared over 59 million documents.

It has grown as more and more clinicians use the expanding network, with more than 6 billion documents exchanged in  2023.