Seize the Moment: TEFCA Value Tomorrow, TEFCA Action Today
Authors: Mrinal Bhasker, Joshua Blagaila
The right data at the right time is lifesaving. In the emergency room, Sarah’s complete medical record ensures she receives the right treatment, avoiding a detrimental drug interaction. Relocating across the country, Jon's new doctor seamlessly accesses his medical history, ensuring continuity of care for his chronic condition. Even while traveling for work in another state, access to her data means Cristina can quickly share her recent lab results during an urgent care visit, avoiding unnecessary tests and delays in treatment. Seattle-King County public health officials, leveraging seamless data exchange, swiftly identify twin flare-ups of Legionnaire's disease in Seattle and Ketchican, Alaska, enabling an immediate and coordinated response.
Sadly, for many Americans, this is all a distant reality. The cost and complexity of establishing the necessary point-to-point integrations to achieve the stories above are too high at every single step – so we accept analog (e.g., phone calls, printed information, patient memory) data access methods as a fact of care. We lack a cost-effective nationwide framework for data exchange that meets the needs of providers, public health agencies, patients, researchers, and payers. We've had glimpses of this before – through regional health information exchanges (HIEs), proprietary vendor-based networks (e.g., Care Everywhere, eHealth Exchange), the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) and Direct Exchange – all efforts by committed players – but a truly national solution for healthcare data exchange has remained elusive.
Enter Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA), the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy’s (ASTP) ambitious effort to make seamless data exchange a reality. TEFCA tackles the reasons all previous efforts failed – lack of standard technology and a common “rules of the road.” Through governance, policy, and technical guidance, TEFCA aims to simplify and improve data exchange nationwide for the benefit of all. Now, its success hinges not on technology or governance, but on the collective buy-in and participation of the entire healthcare industry.
Value Now and Value Later
While the long-term benefits of TEFCA are clear – eliminating the cost of future point-to-point integrations, reducing legal negotiations for data exchange, simplifying architecture negotiations, increasing security through reducing access points – healthcare needs proof of value today to justify a TEFCA build. That's why TEFCA's future success hinges on our ability to find immediate uses for it within our existing interoperability roadmaps. Even in its early stages, TEFCA can offer cost savings by streamlining data exchange projects that are already planned.
So, how can healthcare organizations start realizing the benefits of TEFCA today? The call to action is simple: look at your integration roadmap and ask yourself where you have legal, cost or security barriers to completing your build. TEFCA may be the tool for you now. It has the added benefit of being a cost-bending framework the more you build on it.
Great products are built iteratively, taking a narrow scope, minimal investment and a short timeline to provide something with minimal, but real value. We learn and repeat the process. We're already seeing early sparks, with the CDC successfully leveraging TEFCA to exchange electronic case reports in July 2024. But we need to expand the adoption story.
Ready to Get Started?
It's a journey. At this stage, TEFCA is primarily about shifting your existing healthcare data integration plans to leverage the TEFCA framework. Leap Orbit, with our deep experience in health IT and data interoperability, believes in TEFCA's potential. You are not alone! Our team of experts has extensive experience in implementing and optimizing health data exchange solutions, and we're ready to guide your organization through every step of the TEFCA journey.
If you're ready to take the first step, we're here to help. Reach out to us at inspired@leaporbit.com. It includes indicators and prescriber-set notifications to help healthcare providers assess potential harm to a patient due to high dosing, dangerous drug combinations and risky patient behaviors, such as receiving prescriptions from multiple prescribers or pharmacies.
