Epic founder and CEO Judy Faulkner said 100% of Epic health systems can interoperate and athenahealth has a high interoperability rate, but that still leaves a lot of organizations that can't easily share data.
In a Sept. 23 blog post, she defined interoperability as "healthcare organizations effortlessly sharing patient data with each other for the care of the patient." She cited an ONC report that found that 30% of hospitals aren't fully interoperable.
"One of our customer CIOs told us that their Epic hospitals could exchange data with any other Epic hospital in the country, but their Cerner hospital couldn't exchange data with the Cerner hospital across the street," she wrote. "My immediate response was, 'Then how can we be expected to exchange with that hospital if they themselves can't do it?' I quickly realized that my response was short-sighted — instead, we should figure out how to fix the problem."
Software developer Dave Fuhrmann and his team created Care Everywhere, which is available on Epic's MyChart patient portal, Ms. Faulkner wrote. "Wherever the patient goes, anywhere in the world, the patient can choose to share his or her health data with any health provider who has internet. The appropriate data gets to the new health provider, and the health provider can send a note back to the patient's health system, letting them know what was done."
Ms. Faulkner wrote to "stay tuned" as the "interoperability journey will continue."
Cerner, now known as Oracle Health, makes it "easy for patients to share their records with providers regardless of which EHR they use, but equating a single-use access code with true interoperability is ludicrous," Oracle Health General Manager Seema Verma told Becker's in a statement.
"We know this because we founded the first national network for interoperability, CommonWell Health Alliance. Epic refused to join and fought interoperability efforts for years until the government mandated its participation," Ms. Verma said. "I learned long ago that when someone shows you who they are, it is best to believe them the first time."
In response, an Epic spokesperson told Becker's that many hospitals have moved from Oracle Health to Epic, citing interoperability as a reason.
"We created Care Everywhere in 2008 as the nation's first EHR-based interoperability network. Nearly every Epic customer in the U.S. was already live on Care Everywhere by the time the first providers went live on Oracle Health/Cerner's CommonWell network in 2014," the spokesperson said. "That same year, Epic joined other industry leaders as a co-founder of Carequality — a national, vendor-neutral interoperability network — to get more organizations connected to improve patient care. We were pleased when CommonWell decided to connect to Carequality in 2016."
"Interoperability is a team sport," the spokesperson added. "We hope soon to see Oracle Health/Cerner and others help their customers join TEFCA [the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement], a government-sponsored information-sharing framework created by the bipartisan 21st Century Cures Act. There are more than 400 Epic hospitals and 7,000 Epic clinics live on TEFCA today. We look forward to Oracle Health/Cerner and other vendors connecting their customers to TEFCA for the benefit of patients."