VIENNA, Va., April 12, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Carequality, the trusted exchange framework for nationwide health information exchange, announced today that Alan Swenson, a respected interoperability expert and passionate Carequality volunteer, is joining the organization as the new executive director. Charged with expanding the adoption and use of the framework, Swenson will oversee all strategy and operations.
“I’ve supported and engaged with Carequality as a volunteer since its founding,” said Swenson. “This is an exciting opportunity to now work alongside the dedicated staff full-time as we drive the healthcare industry towards more seamless interoperability. Our work is improving direct patient care by making clinical information immediately available wherever patients are seen, regardless of the EHR system being used. We also strive to continually enhance the volume and quality of information shared through the framework by leveraging collaboration and content standardization.”
Swenson will begin April 12, 2021 and overlap in transition with outgoing, founding Executive Director Dave Cassel. Under Cassel’s leadership, Carequality has developed a vibrant community of stakeholders from across the healthcare continuum. The first health information exchange under the framework, between Epic and athenahealth® customers, was July 1, 2016. The adoption and implementation of the framework by dozens of the country’s leading health information networks, health IT developers, and other service providers has since accelerated, with more than 90 million documents now shared monthly.
Swenson has spent more than a decade focused on health IT interoperability. He has helped lead an exponential increase in patient record sharing through direct collaboration with hundreds of healthcare systems and provider organizations, EHR vendors, HIEs, HISPs, PHRs, payers, government agencies, and other digital health platforms. Swenson has volunteered his time on Carequality’s Steering Committee and various workgroups. He has also volunteered with The Sequoia Project, National Association for the Support of Long Term Care (NASL), CommonWell Health Alliance, DirectTrust, National Quality Forum and HIMSS, among other industry interoperability initiatives.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in health IT interoperability over the past couple of decades,” said Cassel, “but there is still a lot of work to be done. I’m very pleased to hand over the reins of Carequality to someone with Alan’s drive and passion to lead this community. I’m very excited to see him bring his energy to advancing Carequality’s mission of making critical patient data available when and where it is needed to support better patient care and outcomes. I look forward to working with Alan and the Carequality community as a volunteer for years to come.”
About Carequality
Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, interoperabil
The Carequality Framework provides the essential elements for trusted national exchange, such as common rules of the road (including a Trusted Exchange Framework), well-defined technical specifications and a participant directory.
For more information, visit https://carequality.org/
