Healtheway Announces Appointment of Carequality Leadership

MCLEAN, VA--(Marketwired - Nov 3, 2014) - Healtheway, a non-profit, public-private collaborative focused on advancing the implementation of interoperable health information exchange, today announced the appointment of the Carequality Steering Committee, Advisory Council and two working groups. The governance bodies and work groups bring together broad industry and government representation to focus on solving real-world health IT interoperability implementation issues. 

The Carequality founding members launched Carequality in the spring of 2014 under the management of Healtheway. Carequality was formed with an ambitious goal: to tie together the many valuable health information exchange activities occurring throughout the country, and solve the final mile of interoperability between them. The ultimate mission is to create a system much like the ATM network in banking, where healthcare organizations will be able to share information securely over the Internet, regardless of the specific technology platform or network they use.

During the first six months of operation, Carequality members worked together to codify a solid governance process and attract a strong stakeholder base. That formative work led to the appointments announced today, and by bringing together experienced individuals from across industry and government, Carequality is setting the foundation for rapid advancements in operationalizing nationwide, interoperable health information exchange.

"Because we're hoping to accomplish something on a massive, national scale, we knew we needed broad participation from government and industry," said Mariann Yeager, Healtheway CEO. "In selecting Carequality's steering committee and advisory council, there was careful consideration to include large and small organizations representing healthcare providers, pharmacies, long-term and post-acute care, consumers, government, standards development organizations and vendors. Broad representation is essential to effectively manage the needs of all impacted by health IT in the United States."

The committee leadership announced today illustrates not only that Carequality has been successfully able to pull together the right group of organizations to solve the interoperability issue, but also that these organizations see a common need and are willing to work together in order to solve this challenge.

The Steering Committee, which met for the first time in June, is responsible for the Carequality strategy as well as the development and oversight of a fair, equitable and practical process for developing and maintaining an interoperability framework. The Advisory Council serves as the broad stakeholder representative group to inform Carequality's work, while the workgroups will focus on solving specific interoperability challenges related to a set of principles for trust and the ability to query for health information. The Advisory Council and two working groups began meeting within the last month.

According to its charter, the Trust Framework Work Group will create a set of policy principles to establish trust between networks in order to enable the electronic exchange of health information. The Query Work Group will develop a requirements artifact that outlines business, technical, testing and policy requirements to enable simple query of documents between and among networks. Carequality will initially focus on expanding how existing networks are able to request and receive health information (often referred to as query).

Carequality Leadership

Steering Committee Members

• American Medical Association, Dr. Michael Hodgkins (chair)
• Surescripts, Kathy Lewis (co-chair)
• America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Thomas Myers
• Carolinas HealthCare System, Keith McNeice
• Epic, Dave Cassel
• Healthwise, Leslie Kelly Hall
• Kaiser Permanente/Care Connectivity Consortium (CCC), Kevin Isbell
• Kindred Healthcare, Larry Wolf
• New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), Anuj Desai
• Siemens Corporation, Hans Buitendijk
• Social Security Administration, Kitt Winter
• SunCoast RHIO, Lou Galterio
• Walgreens, Venk Reddy

Advisory Council Members

• Stanford Hospital & Clinics, Dr. Matthew Eisenberg (co-chair)
• Kansas Health Information Network (KHIN), Dr. Laura McCrary (co-chair)
• American Medical Association, Matt Reid
• CCHIT, Alisa Ray
• Center for Medical Interoperability, Aaron Goldmuntz
• Centerstone Research Institute, Christina Van Regenmorter
• CGI Federal, Dr. John Loonsk
• Deloitte, Erik Pupo
• Department of Defense, Dr. Barclay Butler
• Department of Veterans Affairs, Elaine Hunolt
• ECRI, Ronni Solomon
• Epic, Peter DeVault
• Fairfax Pediatrics Associates, Dr. Sandy Chung
• Geisinger Health System, Andy Kling
• HL7, Dr. Charles (Chuck) Jaffe
• IBM, Lorraine Fernandes
• IHE International, Dr. David Mendelson
• Medicity, Brian Ahier
• National Association for Home Care and Hospice, Richard Brennan
• Netsmart, A.J. Peterson
• OCHIN, Paul Matthews
• Regenstrief Institute, Shaun Grannis
• St. Luke's Health System, Dr. Marc Chasin
• Surescripts, Keith Willard
• Walgreens, Renee Smith

Health plan representation is still being finalized at this time.

Trust Framework Work Group Members

• St. Luke's Health System, Dr. Marc Chasin (chair)
• Allina, Linda Goettler
• CommonWell Health Alliance, Bob Robke
• Epic, Rob Klootwyk
• HealthBridge, Claudia Allen
• Informatics Corporation of America (ICA), Tim Dunnington
• Intermountain Healthcare, Dr. Sid Thornton
• Medicity, Brian Ahier
• Social Security Administration (SSA), Martin Prahl
• Surescripts, Sara Juster
• Texas Health Services Authority, Tony Gilman

Work group facilitators will be Steve Gravely and Erin Whaley of Troutman Sanders.

Query Work Group Members

• Siemens Corporation, Hans Buitendjik (co-chair)
• Kaiser Permanente, Seth Selkow (co-chair)
• Dignity Health, Sean Turner
• Epic, Justin Stauffer
• ManTech, Adam Rabinowitz
• Mirth Corporation, David Schramm
• Ready Computing, Tone Southerland
• Surescripts, Tara Dragert
• Social Security Administration (SSA), Martin Prahl

Subject Matter Experts

• AEGIS, Joe Lamy
• CommonWell Health Alliance, Bob Robke
• CommonWell Health Alliance, Paul Clip
• Healtheway, Eric Heflin
• ICSA Labs, David Tao
• Interoperability Domain Expert, John Donnelly

Member Quotes

"As a founding member of Carequality, the AMA looks forward to working with other members as we continue to pursue electronic health information exchange that will help physicians coordinate care and improve patient health outcomes. The AMA has long advocated for cost-effective, secure information exchange solutions that are both patient and physician friendly."
Steering Committee Chair Dr. Michael Hodgkins, CMIO, American Medical Association

"Carequality has attracted a broad and representative group of industry leaders to drive its mission of accelerating the exchange of clinical information, enabling clinicians to provide informed, effective and high quality patient care."
Steering Committee Co-Chair Kathy Lewis, Vice President of Advanced Services, Surescripts 

"Siemens Healthcare is pleased to be one of the founding members of Carequality and help our industry take practical steps further enabling access to a patient's health record securely by the right people at the right time to the right information when patient data is maintained across different provider organizations."
Steering Committee Member Hans Buitendijk, HS Standards and Regulations Manager, Siemens Healthcare

"It's great to see such a broad coalition from across the healthcare industry working toward universal interoperability in a transparent way, fostering cooperation that ultimately should help to lower the cost of healthcare."
Steering Committee Member Dave Cassel, Epic

About Carequality
Carequality is a public-private collaborative that facilitates agreement among diverse stakeholders to develop and maintain a common interoperability framework enabling seamless exchange between and among networks. Carequality will bring together a diverse group of representatives from the private sector and government to come to collective agreement on how to enable data to flow seamlessly between and among networks and providers, much like the banking industry did for ATM / ACH transactions. For more information, visit www.carequality.org and follow us at twitter.com/carequality.

About Healtheway
Healtheway is a non-profit organization chartered to advance secure, interoperable nationwide health information exchange (HIE). Healtheway currently supports two initiatives: the eHealth Exchange, a rapidly growing community of exchange partners who share information under a common trust framework and a common set of rules; and Carequality, a public-private collaborative effort to build consensus among existing health IT data exchange programs regarding technical specifications and best practices (similar to when the banking industry created a nationwide ATM network). Healtheway leads in cross-industry collaboration to develop implementation strategies that enable secure, interoperable nationwide exchange of health information. For more information about Healtheway, the eHealth Exchange and Carequality, visit www.healthewayinc.org.