Interoperability 2020—Post-Acute and Behavioral Health
A First Look at Carequality and CommonWell Early Adopters

Netsmart and MatrixCare (Brightree) Leading Out in Adoption; Much Progress Still Needed

Netsmart, who is the largest vendor in behavioral health and has a widespread post–acute care presence, provides Carequality connections for their myUnity home health/long-term care platform and their myAvatar behavioral health platform; approximately 25%–35% of these customer bases have connected. In post–acute care, MatrixCare Home Health and Hospice (Brightree) was one of the first solutions connected; approximately 100 customers have adopted the no-cost CommonWell connection, which requires little effort to establish. More recently, MatrixCare has connected their long-term care solution to Carequality; about 30 customers are live. Homecare Homebase, the most prevalent vendor among large home health agencies, announced their connection to Carequality through Surescripts in June 2019; KLAS estimates that about 10% of customers are currently live. PointClickCare recently enabled a Carequality connection, and a small portion of customers have implemented. WellSky, one of the largest post–acute care vendors, plans to generally release their connection to CommonWell across various platforms starting in Q1 2021. For most of these vendors, connections are early, and even the adoption leaders lag in comparison to the acute and ambulatory care leaders (e.g., athenahealth, Epic, and Cerner).

Netsmart Customers Report Strongest Usability of Outside Data; More Automation Needed from Homecare Homebase and MatrixCare (Long-Term Care)

Netsmart customers report the most advanced capabilities when it comes to accessing and ingesting outside patient data. Customers can automatically pull outside information (such as medications) into the EHR for reconciliation and use filtering tools to search ingested CCDs for relevant lab data and progress notes. PointClickCare and MatrixCare Home Health and Hospice (Brightree) offer some basic automation for things like patient matching and auto querying. Additionally, PointClickCare customers can import problems and medications into the record for reconciliation. MatrixCare’s home health customers say that lab data and progress notes are organized by facility, making it easier to search for relevant data. Customers of Homecare Homebase and MatrixCare (Long-Term Care) like having an electronic version of outside patient records. The records are view only, and customers say the process of searching for and copying outside data into their EHR is manual.

Early Adopters See Value in Their Connections

Though post–acute care and behavioral health organizations are still early in their use of the national networks, 88% of respondents say they are getting value from their connection. These organizations greatly appreciate the ability to access patients’ encounter data and results with a few clicks of the mouse instead having to wait for faxes or chase people down over the phone. For vendors that have enabled a connection, the next step is to provide a more seamless process and improve the usability of the outside data by automating things like queries, patient matching, and the ingestion of relevant data into the patient record for easy reference or reconciliation. Additionally, the more patient records are available for access, the more value organizations will find in the connections. To get full value from the connections, post–acute care and behavioral health organizations must encourage their vendors (if not yet connected) and their referral partners in the acute and ambulatory care space to connect to the national networks.

Vendor Bottom Lines