Epic and Oracle Health sign Veteran Interoperability Pledge

A little less than a year ago, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced its Veterans Interoperability Pledge – an effort to promote information sharing between VA facilities and participating health systems, with the goal of improving coordination of care for veterans receiving care both at the VA and in their communities.

More than a dozen major health systems – Emory Healthcare, Inova, Jefferson Health, Sanford Health, UC Davis, Intermountain, Mass General Brigham, Rush Health, Tufts Medicine, Marshfield Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, UPMC and Atrium Health – signed the pledge, pledging to support its three key goals:

• Accurately identify veterans when they seek care from private sector providers.

• By connecting them with VA and community services that promote health, especially services that reduce their out-of-pocket costs.

• Coordinating care for shared patients, regardless of whether or not they have VA health insurance, by exchanging information about care requested and provided.

The health systems agreed to provide health systems access to: authoritative VA resources for determining veteran status; automation of eligibility determinations for benefits and referrals; access to identifying local, state, and federal health care resources; clinical and administrative data for quality assessment and care coordination.

They also pledged to promote their own implementation of national interoperability standards and privacy and security frameworks related to the exchange and use of health information.

This week, the Interoperability Pledge got another big boost, with both Epic and Oracle Health pledging to make all of their hospital customers able to connect to VA systems for more efficient data exchange.

In a September 18 LinkedIn PostDr. Shereef Elnahal, Under Secretary for Health and Human Services at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, announced the big news that “starting today,” all hospital customers of these two major electronic health record vendors “can connect to VA systems to identify veterans and link them to earned benefits.”

Both companies are leveraging the promise of open application programming interfaces and “have made code available to ALL of their hospital and health system customers so they can identify veterans in their workflow by connecting to VA’s open API system,” Elnahal said.

He also provided an update on how some participating health systems have improved their interoperability goals since the 2023 pledge was first announced in October.

For example, Sanford Health has identified 12,000 veteran patients using the open API and can now link them to information detailing all the health care and benefits they are entitled to through the VA, he said.

Tufts Medicine, meanwhile, is using the API tool to “identify veterans in a suicidal crisis in the emergency room, connect them with free VA coverage for that care, and, most importantly, notify the VA medical center in Boston that a veteran needs essential follow-up care,” Elnahal said.

Marshfield Clinic has also “connected thousands of veterans with information about their earned benefits under the PACT Act“, he said.

In a separate announcement, Oracle Health applauded Marshfield’s early adoption of the API code package and encouraged its other EHR customers to download and install and deploy the code package for free using their internal IT teams.

“Having data flow with the patient throughout their care journey is essential and, in some cases, life-saving,” Seema Verma, general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, said in a statement. “Patients need to be confident that every provider they visit has access to their records and medical history to ensure timely and accurate care, and Oracle Health is working to make that a reality for all U.S. veterans.”

Last month, Epic highlighted its own recent work in standards-based interoperability, which extends beyond its own customer base.

“We’ve opened an API so our customers can connect patients to apps outside of the Epic system,” said Matt Doyle, Epic’s head of software development for interoperability.

Mike Miliard is Editor-in-Chief of Healthcare IT News
Email the author: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS.