Integration & Interoperability News

Health IT Vendor Releases API for Interoperability With 3 National HIEs

The API enables health IT vendors with 100+ underlying clients to scale quickly by controlling patient query permissions from three HIEs across all their clients.

Health IT Vendor Releases API for Interoperability With 3 National HIEs

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By Hannah Nelson

- Health IT vendor Particle Health has announced a new offering that provides an interoperability gateway to three national health information exchanges (HIEs) through a single application programming interface (API).

The tool connects to CommonWell Health Alliance, Carequality, and eHealth Exchange.

Health IT vendors like telehealth providers, remote patient monitoring offerings, and care management organizations often face interoperability challenges because they do not have direct patient treatment relationships, while their customers do.

Since health information networks (HINs) require stakeholders to document patient record queries and attribute them to the entity with the direct treatment relationship, health IT vendors must maintain a list of every customer they serve, every endpoint that can be queried, and every query that has been made. These tasks can add significant operational and administrative expenses.

Particle for Platforms provides a customer-accessible management API layer to help health IT organizations with 100+ underlying clients control patient query permissions across all their clients.

"Software-enabled healthcare companies have many overlapping needs in their operational software," Troy Bannister, CEO of Particle Health, said in a press release. "For each company to build its own version of these tools is a wildly inefficient use of capital. Particle for Platforms is a game-changer for their day-to-day operations."

"Particle is now empowering health IT platform vendors and their clients with an onramp to interoperability through our single API that connects to all HINs, along with access to data previously unavailable to them," Bannister added.

ONC selected CommonWell Health Alliance and eHealth Exchange, two of the HIEs Particle for Platforms connects to, as part of the first group of Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) candidates to implement the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

TEFCA aims to create a universal floor of interoperability across the country through a network of QHINs.