Networks - HIEs (Health Information Exchanges)

Particle’s API Platform uses three nationwide healthcare data exchange networks, Carequality, Commonwell, and eHealth Exchange as well Healthix, the public HIE for downstate New York, to retrieve information about patients. The networks vary in terms of their capabilities and requirements; Particle manages all of this complexity on behalf of our clients.

As the US medical system involves a very heterogeneous mix of care providers and IT infrastructure, these networks enforce standardization across three areas:

1. Technical Implementation: How to request, receive and submit patient information
2. Legal, Trust, and Verification: One legal agreement for all members, secure infrastructure for network operation, and a verification process to allow entities to make queries
3. Operation: Ensuring that the ongoing behavior of participants is in accordance with the legal, technical, and security guidelines set by the networks

The networks differ slightly in how they choose to apply this standardization.

• Carequality and eHealthExchange use a decentralized framework wherein all participants are nodes in a network and can query each other, provided that they are members in good standing and use the Carequality- and eHealthExchange- defined standards when making and responding to queries.
• Commonwell uses a hub model requiring members to submit all requests to a Commonwell-operated service, which then makes queries against member endpoints on behalf of the requester.
• Healthix aggregates and updates data from across their participating organizations. When a participating organization places a patient query to Healthix, Healthix dynamically generates and returns a longitudinal CCDA that includes all data that they have aggregated across participating organizations to-date for that patient.

Particle is an active member of these networks and participates in committees related to standards definition, implementation, and deployment.