Surescripts facilitated 17.7 billion health data exchange transactions in 2018, representing a 29 percent increase over 2017.
Membership and participation in the Surescripts network continues to rise year over year, with healthcare organizations engaging in 17.7 billion transactions in 2018.
This finding came in a 2018 National Progress Report outlining the network’s efforts to enable more connections between healthcare organizations and facilitate high-quality health data exchange last year.
“In 2018, we expanded and enhanced our reach among organizations that connect pharmacists, physicians, payers and patients,” stated Surescripts in the report. “These organizations make up the Surescripts Network Alliance — and make Surescripts the nation’s single most trusted and capable health information network.”
Virtually all EHR vendors, pharmacy benefit managers, pharmacies, clinicians, and an increasing number of health plans are currently part of the Surescripts network. In 2018, the number of healthcare professionals part of the network increased by 10 percent.
Additionally, healthcare providers added 8 million patients to the Surescripts Master Patient Index in 2018. Currently, there are about 258 million patient health records in the database.
The number of transactions between Surescripts participants has also jumped significantly, increasing from 13.7 billion in 2017 to 17.7 billion in 2018.
“When we look at this vast exchange of actionable patient intelligence across care settings, we see interoperability in action — and in evolution,” stated authors of the report. “For some transaction types, achieving massive adoption lets us shift our attention toward the next step: improving the quality of that intelligence.”
“Other transactions are still emerging, but early results suggest an enormous potential impact once they reach widespread use,” authors added.
Surescripts also made efforts in 2018 to proliferate widespread use of health data exchange standards.
“In 2018, we convened the Network Alliance to support the industry’s transition to the National Council for Prescription Drug Programs SCRIPT Standard v2017071, which has a regulatory effective date of January 1, 2020,” report authors stated.
The new standard will help to modernize e-prescribing and medication history transactions, improve patient safety and prescription accuracy, and minimize manual processes that require care providers to exit clinical workflows to share data.
Surescripts participants are also increasing their use of the Record Locator & Exchange service. More than 106,000 clinicians used the service in 2018 to exchange more than 99 million care location summaries.
Additionally, more providers began using the Direct protocol to share clinical Direct messages in 2018. More than 596,000 users shared clinical Direct messages last year, representing a 13 percent increase over 2017.
“Together with participants in the Surescripts Network Alliance, we made significant progress in 2018, leveraging the power of interoperability to help lower costs and improve care,” said Surescripts CEO Tom Skelton.
“In 2019, we will continue to expand the reach of the actionable patient intelligence we deliver at the point of care, helping transform interactions among clinicians, pharmacists and patients to continually improve the patient experience, drive better care outcomes and reduce costs,” Skelton concluded.
Surescripts will continue to focus on overcoming persistent barriers to interoperability in the coming years to ensure healthcare organizations have access to a comprehensive view of patient health for better-informed care decisions.
Over the past year, Surescripts has also worked to address problems with medication price transparency.
“The ability to have a prescriber understand, ‘Hey, something just showed up in my office. I’m going to prescribe a high blood pressure medication. Here’s what his plan says it’s going to cost him,’” explained Skelton in a 2018 interview with EHRIntelligence.com.
Ensuring all members of a patient or population’s care team has access to complete medication and prescription information facilitates the development of a truly value-based care system.
Date: April 25, 2019
Source: EHR Intelligence