Surescripts announces broad implementation of National Record Locator Service
ARLINGTON, Va. — Surescripts has announced that it will implement its National Record Locator Service with electronic health record vendors eClinicalWorks, Epic, and Greenway Health, enabling more than 480,000 providers to utilize the technology to locate and exchange patient health records stored in any healthcare location across the country.
The Surescripts National Record Locator Service is a federated query and response solution that integrates into the provider workflow through existing EHR software. The first-of-its-kind capability leverages the Surescripts nationwide network and Master Patient Index of more than 230 million patients to locate and exchange patient records and give clinicians a fast and easy way to obtain a more complete view of a patient’s health history, without relying on a patient’s recollections of their medical history.
“Today marks a major milestone in our collective effort to connect the nation’s healthcare system and enable interoperability between disparate parts of our healthcare community,” stated Tom Skelton, CEO, Surescripts. “By leveraging the assets and existing infrastructure we built for e-prescribing, we are able to quickly scale true interoperability on a national basis to save time and money, and ultimately improve the patient experience.”
The Surescripts network gives providers the ability to find a patient’s records when and where they need it most. With connections between 60,000 pharmacies, 900,000 healthcare professionals, 3,000 hospitals, and 700 EHR applications, more than 7 billion secure, electronic transactions, including prescriptions, referrals, discharges, visit summaries, immunization notifications, and radiology reports, crossed the Surescripts network in 2014.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 20% of preventable medical errors are caused by the lack of immediate access to health information, and 1-out-of-7 primary care visits is impacted by missing medical information. Interoperability is defined by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT as the ability of systems to exchange and use electronic health information from other systems without special effort on the part of the user. In order to realize true healthcare IT interoperability, a number of challenges must be overcome, including patient identification, record locating, document sharing, and clinical care documentation.