The CARIN Alliance is a bipartisan, multi-sector collaborative working to advance consumer-directed exchange of health information.

Overview

Convened by David Blumenthal, David Brailer, Aneesh Chopra, and Mike Leavitt in early 2016, its members include leading U.S. organizations in three categories:

• Consumers – Consumer advocates, purchasers, and others.

• HIPAA covered entities – Providers, plans and clearinghouses, and their business associates.

• HIPAA non-covered entities – Consumer-facing digital health apps, devices and services, consumer platforms, researchers, and infrastructure firms including standards setting organizations, identity providers, certifiers, and data exchange networks.

Vision

CARIN’s vision is to rapidly advance the ability for consumers and their authorized caregivers to easily get, use, and share their digital health information when, where, and how they want to achieve their goals.

Guiding Principles

CARIN’s work is guided by the following guiding principles:

• Collaboration – Empower consumers and providers to partner in health care decisions at every level, wherever the consumer seeks care.
• Availability – Make consumer health information easy to get, use, and share by consumers and their care teams.
• Usability – Make consumer health information digital, valuable, and intuitively understood by the end user.
• Multi-platform – Use an ecosystem of innovative platforms while remaining platform agnostic.
• Consensus best practices – Support industry best practices with implementing consumer-directed exchange.

Strategic Priorities

CARIN is focused on overcoming barriers to consumer-directed exchange in four areas:

1. Trust barriers. CARIN is developing a trust framework for consumer-directed exchange.
2. Technical barriers. CARIN is developing ways to help providers and others share best practices on how they are implementing the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-based application program interfaces (APIs) and using them to advance consumer-directed health information exchange.
3. Adoption barriers. CARIN is developing ways to assist organizations who are implementing consumer-directed exchange with the goal of improving quality, outcomes, affordability, and patient satisfaction.
4. Policy barriers. CARIN is developing policy recommendations to help inform including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC), the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and other regulators about ways to support the private sector in implementing the above strategies.

Work is done through workgroups organized to support progress in each area.

To learn more about CARIN, or explore opportunities to participate in our activities, please contact us.

Key Contacts

Board Members and Participants

Project Contacts