Surescripts’ announced that several electronic health record vendors, including Epic, eClinicalWorks, Greenway, NextGen and Aprima are now offering its National Record Locator Service to their clients. The NRLS enables providers to see where patients have received care and to retrieve clinical records irrespective of geography.
The nationwide health information network, in fact, just started offering free access to the record locator – which launched this year with data on 140 million patients and more than 2 billion interactions – to EHR vendors until 2019, another example of private-sector collaborations meant to improve information sharing among providers across the U.S.
“We are committed to working with all vendors to accelerate the adoption of record locator and exchange, while adding valuable new services to make meaningful health information available to providers,” said Tom Skelton, Chief Executive Officer for Surescripts, in a statement.
Surescripts partners with some of these vendors as part of the Carequality Interoperability Framework, which just this past month announced that eClinicalWorks, Epic, NextGen and others were leveraging common technical specifications to share data among 200 hospitals and 3,000 clinics.
With this new initiative, providers whose EHRs include Surescripts’ NRLS will be able to see where their patients have care over time, across locations and among different IT systems, enabling more comprehensive health management.
“Our customers have already seen increases in record location using Surescripts NRLS,” said Carl Dvorak, president of Epic. “A free NRLS could be a game changer to expand and accelerate vendor-neutral search – a big win for patient care nationwide and providers preparing for the reality of the post-reform environment.”
“We’re very pleased to see that the Carequality Framework is able to advance the work of services like the Surescripts NRLS and to aid in its adoption by so many participants,” added Dave Cassel, director of Carequality, which is an initiative of the Sequoia Project. “A big part of our mission is providing the ecosystem in which different services can flourish, all doing their part to ensure that critical health information is securely available, whenever and wherever needed.”
