The embattled electronic health records and health IT vendor eClinicalWorks has exchanged in 12 months more than two million documents via the eClinicalWorks EHR through the Carequality Interoperability Framework. The real-time data transfer between disparate systems facilitates coordination of care between providers in various care settings and helps ensure they have more complete and accurate patient information at the point of care.
Carequality is a national, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks.
This latest news gives some momentum to other data-sharing efforts by eClinicalWorks. The vendor’s client Eagle Physicians & Associates exchanged health data with hospitals running rival Epic’s EHR also through the Carequality Interoperability Framework in June.
[Also: eClinicalWorks adds telehealth feature to mobile app]
All of this news comes after a $155 million settlement in which the U.S. Department of Justice charged eClinicalWorks with fraudulently obtaining certification under the meaningful use EHR program that enables customers to attest to certain criteria and, in turn, collect reimbursement incentives from the federal government. According to the settlement, eClinicalWorks must either upgrade existing customers for free or transfer their data to rival EHRs.
The bad news for eClinicalWorks hasn’t stopped the EHR vendor from winning new customers, though. For example, in early June, federally qualified health center Ezras Choilim signed on for the vendor’s EHR and population health cloud services.
[Also: eClinicalWorks to pay $155 million to settle suit alleging it faked meaningful use certification]
And in July, Central Florida ACO, NEXT ACO of Nature Coast and Space Coast ACO contracted for the vendor’s Population Health Management technology for their combined 90 providers and more than 17,000 beneficiaries.
In June, on another front, eClinicalWorks added telemedicine functionality to its mobile app. The company’s device-agnostic platform offers practice management and patient engagement tools. The addition of the TeleVisits feature appears to be designed to nudge eClinicalWorks into the one-stop-shop domain.
Back in the realm of Carequality Interoperability Framework data sharing, some eClinicalWorks clients are quite happy with the vendor’s achievement of exchanging more than two million documents in 12 months.
“At Coastal Medical, we are dedicated to providing our patients with the highest quality care possible,” said Mice Chen, CIO of Coastal Medical. “That requires sharing important health data between our providers at other hospitals and facilities in the state.”
With the adoption of the Carequality Interoperability Framework, through the organization’s eClinicalWorks EHR, the organization can retrieve critical patient health data from Lifespan hospitals that use Epic and make the organization’s patients’ data available to them, Chen added.
“This seamless information sharing, from within the EHR, helps bridge gaps that existed in the past and helps us in the systematic coordination of patient care by being able to potentially prevent duplication of services and costly hospitalizations and ER visits,” Chen said.
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com