Many healthcare organizations, including skilled nursing facilities, and also senior living communities, have touted interoperability as a major goal, and now a national framework exists to help them achieve it.
The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, or TEFCA, went live this week. It was a project seven years in the making.
The TEFCA framework, which was first mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, is intended to help facilitate the exchange of health information between various systems.
Five organizations were designated “qualified health information networks” that will support data exchange under the TEFCA umbrella: eHealth Exchange, Epic Nexus, Health Gorilla, KONZA and MedAllies.
For senior living and care operators, such a framework can help guide how residents’ health data are accessed, either via electronic health records or monitoring apps.
A slate of new health technologies depend on access to these data, either because more older adults are using telemedicine or because new tools can use health metrics to help prevent falls or other health emergencies.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced TEFCA going operational on Tuesday.
“After over a decade of very hard work, today marks another major milestone in our march towards a 21st-century digital healthcare system,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “TEFCA allows patients, providers, public health professionals, health insurers and other healthcare stakeholders to safely and securely share information critical to the health of our country and all of our people.”
Interoperability remains a challenge for skilled nursing providers, as administrators have expressed a willingness to change and innovate, but progress remains slow and there is often a frustrating communication gap between different healthcare settings, McKnight’s Long-Term Care News reported over the fall.
The two-page outline for the TEFCA agreement can be found here.
