Read on to find out what the heck “TEFCA” is and how it’s relevant to providers.
Not too long ago, the 21st Century Cures Act passed and mandated that a “Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement” (TEFCA) be created. As a busy healthcare organization, we know you may not have time to do a “deep dive” into the recently released TEFCA draft proposal and what it means for your practice, so we’ve summarize the important parts for you below.
The intent of TEFCA is to…
- Create a common rule set that will allow healthcare organizations to trust each other with exchange of protected health information (PHI) across organizational boundaries.
- Serve as a means to advance interoperability participation
- Usher in the ability for disparate Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and health systems to be able to communicate with each other electronically
The Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) delivered a draft of TEFCA on January 5th of this year and asked for feedback with a relatively short comment period ending February 20th, 2018. The proposed TEFCA draft is made of two parts: Part A – Principles for Trusted Exchange, and Part B – Minimum Required Terms and Conditions for Trusted Exchange. Additionally, ONC’s draft outlined three major areas of support for patient access, population health data exchange, and open and accessible application programming interfaces (APIs –or what we call apps!). We can expect the final TEFCA to be delivered in late 2018.
Scott Stuewe, our Director of Strategy and Interoperability at ScanSTAT, recently weighed in on what TEFCA means for the traditional medical practice. “TEFCA intends to provide a ‘single on-ramp’ for data exchange, meaning provider organizations should only have to participate in one of many networks nationally and these networks would talk to each other, lessening the burden on providers” offered Stuewe.
“It will give us a single set of rules and technical approaches to support healthcare data exchange and interoperability. We at ScanSTAT do have a few concerns about cost burdens it may place on practices and hospitals, but if the ONC can get this right, it will be beneficial to providers and patients across the United States”.
As a general member of the CommonWell Health Alliance, ScanSTAT participated in the Government Affairs committee TEFCA draft commentary and review promoting interoperability for the common good. However, as a business associate partner to many provider practices like yours, ScanSTAT has our own unique perspective. We carefully reviewed the TEFCA draft and offered comments with you in mind – here’s what we had to say on your behalf. We don’t believe already overburdened providers should have to bear the burden of free data exchange, and we hope ONC hears our concerns.
When the final TEFCA guidance comes out, we hope many of the concerns raised will be addressed, and if so, TEFCA will help ease the data exchange burden on providers today. You may be interested in reviewing comments from various organizations with different perspectives, including CommonWell, the Sequoia Project and HIMSS.
ScanSTAT will certainly be watching the rule-making process and will continue to advocate on your behalf. When the final rule is deployed, we will be here to help you with a path forward.
Want to talk more about the industry impacts of interoperability? Come see us at the Interoperability Showcase at HIMSS 2018.