Health IT software company athenahealth hit a key interoperability milestone with more than 100,000 provider customers now connected to a government-backed data exchange framework.
The company says it's the first healthcare IT company to implement the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) at scale.
The announcement comes just one day ahead of a planned White House meeting with healthcare tech leaders to promote health data sharing, according to multiple media outlets. Bloomberg reported Sunday that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Mehmet Oz are expected to host tech executives at a White House event this week, citing sources familiar with the matter.
Inside Health Policy reported the event is scheduled for Wednesday to highlight a new industry interoperability pledge that will be signed by EHR vendors, TEFCA qualified health information networks (QHINs), and other health IT stakeholders, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
An athenahealth spokesperson confirmed a company representative would attend the White House event.
Athenahealth provides electronic health records software, revenue cycle management and patient engagement solutions to physician practices and providers.
TEFCA establishes a single, nationwide framework for data exchange for healthcare that was mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act back in 2016. TEFCA, which went live in December 2023, was designed to create an infrastructure to enable data sharing between health information networks. TEFCA marks a critical step in establishing universal connectivity across providers and establishes universal governance, policy and a technical floor for nationwide interoperability.
TEFCA was created by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP) to remove barriers for sharing health records electronically among healthcare providers, patients, public health agencies, and payers.
Electronic health records giant Epic announced in June that more than 1,000 hospital customers and 22,000 clinics using its EHR are now live on TEFCA.
Athenahealth has now migrated all eligible providers on its athenaOne network to TEFCA to seamlessly exchange data, including with Epic and other participating systems. The announcement affirms the company's role "as a driving force behind a modern, patient- and provider- centric health data ecosystem," according to executives.
"Our customers are all enabled for TEFCA with the great majority of them live. A number of them are still pending eligibility through a vetting process that will conclude here in the next few weeks. But, we are really excited that everybody is technically enabled," Sam Lambson, vice president of data and ecosystem platform at athenahealth, said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare in a preview of the announcement.
The announcement marks a significant step toward a "unified, nationwide network that enables seamless, secure, and automatic access to complete medical records – including clinical notes, scanned images, and unstructured content – in formats aligned with national standards of clinical information,” Lambson said.
“We’re not at the finish line though, but rather a starting point for what’s next: a future where health information follows the patient, and insights replace fragmentation to drive better care," he said.
Lambson credits athenahealth's "API-first" strategy that enabled the company to implement TEFCA faster than other companies. "This is not an easy transition," he noted.
The White House meeting builds on a May initiative in which CMS and HHS' health IT office asked for public comment on how to ease data exchange among the healthcare ecosystem for patients, providers, payers, vendors and value-based care organizations. That request for information garnered just over 1,300 comments from trade groups, provider and hospital associations, individual companies, payers, patients and providers, staff writer Emma Beavins reported.
CMS also signaled plans to undertake several new health tech initiatives, including a national provider directory and modern identity verification for Medicare beneficiaries.
Athenahealth's athenaOne network is fully aligned with TEFCA through CommonWell Health Alliance, a federally designated Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). The company has a history of collaboration with other organizations in healthcare to support data sharing.
"We believe that it's important to rally behind ways of making data sharing more effective and impactful for our ambulatory practices and their patients," Lambson said. "We can work in direct collaboration with all of the other EHRs and other types of endpoints in the market to solve some of these problems that have not been solved."
"We've been steadily working in these interoperability, wonk-ish corners of the market for a long time," Lambson said about industry health data sharing efforts. Implementing TEFCA at scale unlocks access to data for patients, he noted.
Athenahealth says its connection to TEFCA supports Individual Access Services (IAS) capabilities which enables patients to use apps of their choice to retrieve copies of their medical records.
IAS isn’t another portal, app or health data network, according to company executives. It’s a set of national standards that make health data portable, defining how individuals can securely access their health records from multiple providers and systems, all in one place, according to athenahealth.
Lambson refers to TEFCA as building the "chassis" for interoperability and other use cases will soon follow, including payment, healthcare operations and government benefit determinations.
"This is where we really sink our teeth into it and start to advance beyond just doctor-to-doctor or doctor-to-patient and we start to think about provider-to-payer, provider-to-pharmacy and research and provider-to-benefits," he noted.
Athenahealth's efforts to advance interoperability also means evolving beyond data access to deliver insights at the point of care, according to executives.
"Being on TEFCA means we're going to transition to more and more high-quality data, which means, in turn, we can make the use of that data in the provider's workflow more intelligent, leveraging things like generative AI for summaries and searches and finding the data that's most relevant to what they're doing in the moment of care," Lambson said.
The company has been rolling out ChartSync, a tool that enables providers to access and interact with data retrieved from TEFCA and other sources, reducing the administrative burden associated with chasing down records and eliminating gaps in clinical information, executives said.