Onramp to TEFCA-CommonWell

Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is a unified interoperability network led by the U.S. government. By setting common policies, technical standards, and governance structures, TEFCA streamlines health information exchange while ensuring privacy, security, and patient consent protections.

TEFCA’s approach includes a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) model, where designated QHINs serve as central hubs for exchanging data between participants.

TEFCA is built on lessons learned from a decade of data sharing on other clinical networks:

• eHealthExchange
• Carequality
• CommonWell

However, TEFCA expands data sharing on the network to a broader range of healthcare participants:

• healthcare providers
• payers
• public health agencies
• individuals
• researchers

In addition to broader participation, TEFCA also plans to evolve how data is shared. It expands from a document-based sharing approach to a more flexible adaptive FHIR®-based exchange.

As the network matures, TEFCA is expected to reduce administrative burdens, improve care coordination, enhance public health response capabilities, and empower patients with greater access to their health data.

You can onramp to TEFCA-CommonWell with the Redox Data Model API. Review our setup info before getting started.

Review these how-to guides for each step of your workflow with TEFCA-CommonWell:

1. Create a TEFCA-CommonWell organization record. You only need to do this step once when you’re implementing with TEFCA-CommonWell.
2. Populate TEFCA-CommonWell with your patient records. Push your patient data to TEFCA-CommonWell to populate your patient records and documents to the clinical network. Patient demographics should be kept up-to-date before you start querying for data.
3. (Optional) Search TEFCA-CommonWell for patient records. This is an optional step if you want to confirm a patient record exists in TEFCA-CommonWell or you want to locate specific sites to directly query.
4. Request patient documents from TEFCA-CommonWell. You will likely repeat this step of the workflow the most as you work with patients and query for their data from this clinical network.
5. Maintain your Redox repository for TEFCA-CommonWell. You will need to repeat this step of the workflow consistently to keep your own patient data up-to-date for other clinical network participants.