HealthEx – through a cross-industry effort with athenahealth, CLEAR, MedAllies and CommonWell Health Alliance – has launched an end-to-end patient data interoperability platform that relies on individual access services (IAS) under the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement.
The platform supports both consolidated clinical document architecture and FHIR-based exchange, enabling data access across health systems and supporting emerging artificial intelligence applications, the company said.
WHY IT MATTERS
Patients can access, retrieve and use their own medical information and health data and share it with whomever they choose through the platform, HealthEx announced on Tuesday.
The company said patient data exchange is secure and seamless and compared the experience and functionality of control over their health records to that of Apple Wallet technology.
The platform provides identity verification and real-time consent management with transparent audit trails, HealthEx said, and shows who accessed data and when.
It verifies identity and authenticates users through CLEAR, a NIST IAL2/AAL2-certified service, and first captures patient consent before retrieving clinical records from current IAS exchange purpose responders – such as athenahealth – through TEFCA exchange with qualified health information networks like MedAllies and CommonWell Health Alliance.
Although individual access services under the national health data interoperability framework have been available, HealthEx and its partners say the patient-centric platform is one of the first that delivers on federal efforts to expand health data interoperability.
"Our pioneering work with HealthEx enables IAS transactions from athenahealth to HealthEx across our QHIN, supporting the CMS vision for identity-verified, auditable, patient-initiated data access," said Dr. John Blair, CEO of MedAllies, in the announcement.
HealthEx said in helping to support federal goals to "kill the clipboard," the platform enables patients to access and share records in meaningful ways. Patient visibility into their healthcare record could better inform their healthcare decisions, identify treatment options and ease navigation burdens of complex surgical recoveries.
As an example, a Medicare patient can use the HealthEx platform to access their records from multiple providers after a cataract surgery to coordinate medications between the surgeon and primary care doctor at different hospitals.
"IAS is essential to making health data truly portable and empowering patients by giving them expanded control and access to their health information in its entirety," Sam Lambson, athenahealth's VP data and ecosystem platform, said in the statement. "With IAS enabled at scale across athenahealth, solutions like HealthEx demonstrate how patients can truly benefit from seamless, standards-based access to their own medical history."
THE LARGER TREND
Some consumers have connected with their electronic health record data through apps, but enabling data exchange with multiple providers at scale has been a challenge. While EHR vendors and QHINs under TEFCA have committed to supporting IAS, few have done so thus far.
Last year, Epic launched an API enabling patients to connect with apps outside of Epic, Matt Doyle, the vendor's interoperability software development lead, told Healthcare IT News.
When a patient uses a health app that is part of TEFCA, they authenticate in MyChart to find access to their health records available through the national directory.
One of the challenges in creating the API, Doyle explained at the time, was ensuring that patients would understand they would be taking their data out of the HIPAA ecosystem. Providers need assurances that they're complying with HIPAA obligations, so the API must ensure authentication when it enables permission to release the data, he said.
ON THE RECORD
"Patients can now authenticate and consent to receive their health records in real time when they need them most to make better health decisions," said Dr. Priyanka Agarwal, CEO of HealthEx, in a statement. "Patients remain in control of their data at all times."
"Healthcare is personal and secure identity verification is the foundation of safe access to personal health information," David Bardan, CLEAR's general manager of healthcare, added. "Working with HealthEx we can bring frictionless, IAL2-verified identity to patients so they can unlock their health records with confidence and ease."
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.
