All eligible providers on the athenaOne network have been migrated to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, athenahealth announced Tuesday.
WHY IT MATTERS
With providers migrated to TEFCA, athenahealth said it has made a significant stride in nationwide interoperability as the first healthcare IT company to implement TEFCA at scale.
The TEFCA migration is a starting point for a future where health information follows the patient and insights drive better care, according to Sam Lambson, athenahealth's vice president of data and ecosystem platform.
"This achievement marks a significant step toward a unified, nationwide network that enables seamless, secure, and automatic access to complete medical records – including clinical notes, scanned images and unstructured content – in formats aligned with national standards of clinical information," he said in a statement.
Athenahealth's interoperability strategy is nurtured by its collaboration with other healthcare organizations, including CommonWell Health Alliance, the EHR vendor's long-term health information exchange partner. CommonWell was one of the first HIEs approved to participate in TEFCA as a Qualified Health Information Network.
By supporting Individual Access Services, or IAS, capabilities for confirming their digital identities, patients have instant access to their clinical records without the need to log in.
The company said the TEFCA migration further supports provider access to more patient health data insights directly at the point of care through its ChartSync platform, which allows athenaOne users to interact with data from TEFCA and other HIE sources.
THE LARGER TREND
Physician burnout and the demand for getting pertinent patient data at the point of care have made interoperability a priority, the company said. A better-curated flow of information improves providers' interoperability experiences, according to Jessica Sweeney-Platt, athenahealth's vice president of research and editorial strategy.
The EHR vendor first previewed ChartSync, which deduplicates incoming data and provides clinicians with a unified view across multiple EHRs, at the HIMSS Global Health Conference & Exhibition last year.
To extend the experience, athenahealth launched an ambient note solution that takes a draft patient dialogue summary note and inserts it directly into a patient's chart on behalf of a physician.
By leveraging artificial intelligence, the tool "really transforms their experience, removes hours of documentation, makes it simpler, makes it a more accurate note and actually improves the overall coding and billing side," Chad Dodd, athenahealth's vice president of product management, told Healthcare IT News in March ahead of this year's conference.
ON THE RECORD
"Our partnership with athenahealth is critical to the success of advancing interoperability efforts across the industry, as they prioritize collaboration over competition," said Paul Wilder, CommonWell Health Alliance's executive director, in a statement.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
