Epic aims to bring all clients live on TEFCA by 2025

EHR vendor Epic plans to have all its clients committed to TEFCA participation by the end of 2024, with a go-live target for the end of 2025.

In a news release, the EHR vendor said that many customers have already signed up to join TEFCA through its qualified health information network (QHIN), Epic Nexus.

TEFCA is a federal initiative to improve interoperability between healthcare providers and payers through a network of networks approach.

In addition to Epic's announcement, interoperability network Carequality has announced plans to align with TEFCA.

With a goal for future convergence of the two frameworks, Carequality is aligning its policies with TEFCA, including the following:

• Using existing Carequality policies to address community concerns about required responses to queries.
• Advancing the ongoing consideration and adoption of policy revisions to align with TEFCA's approach to the definition of treatment.
• Establishing stronger directory integrity controls.
• Integrating TEFCA Delegate policies into Carequality's existing On-Behalf-Of policies to increase transparency and controls.

"We commend Carequality's recently announced plan to align with TEFCA," Epic officials said in a press release. "Carequality's Treatment Use Cases will reflect the definitions used in TEFCA, for example, and new delegate policies will allow healthcare organizations to review and approve organizations requesting records on their behalf, just as they can under TEFCA."

Epic said that it will continue to support clients' connectivity through Carequality during the transition to help ensure healthcare interoperability.

The Carequality network includes 100% participation from Epic customers. Overall, the framework connects more than 70% of U.S. hospitals, 50,000+ clinics, and more than 600,000 care providers.

"TEFCA is the nation's best opportunity to get the remaining 30% of U.S. hospitals off the sidelines and reinforce trust between data exchange networks and care organizations," Epic officials said.

Hannah Nelson has been covering news related to health information technology and health data interoperability since 2020.