What are Network Onramps?

Last updated: Jun 12, 2025
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PRODUCT OWNER

Need data for a patient from multiple healthcare organizations? One option is setting up business agreements with lots of individual organizations and querying them one at a time. Or you can use Network Onramps, which allow you to make one connection to gain access to clinical networks.

Benefits of Network Onramps

  • Lightning-fast onboarding. Use our extensive experience to get to production and value within days. As your implementer, we complete your certification process, and our self-service wizard lets you set up Network Onramps at your own pace.
  • Modern technology. Standards are hard—and they get harder when you combine multiple types. Let us do the heavy-lifting by using our proven data models to get you up and running.
  • Management and maintenance. We provide tools to:
    • build out your organization while staying in sync with clinical networks;
    • protect you from sending invalid data; and
    • answer your questions.

Available onramps

Currently, we support onramps to these clinical networks.

Carequality

The Carequality Interoperability Framework is a nationwide network of healthcare organizations with over 600K providers, 50K clinics, over 4,200 hospitals, and millions of patient records. Carequality participants exchange over 150M clinical summary documents every month. Learn about using an onramp to Carequality.

TEFCA-CommonWell

Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is a nationwide trusted network built upon a decade of best practices. By setting common policies, technical standards, and governance structures, TEFCA streamlines health information exchange while ensuring privacy, security, and patient consent protections.

To access TEFCA, you must use a certified Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). Currently, we support accessing TEFCA via CommonWell. Learn about using an onramp to TEFCA.

CommonWell

CommonWell Health Alliance is a nonprofit member-driven alliance and Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN). The organization is dedicated to the secure and seamless flow of healthcare data to improve patient care and the vision that all healthcare data should be available to clinicians, care teams, and patients, regardless of where care occurs. CommonWell connects 36,000 provider organizations that support 240 million lives. Learn more about CommonWell.

You can onramp to CommonWell or use CommonWell as a QHIN to access TEFCA.

What data is exchanged

Clinical networks supports the exchange of C-CDA documents, which is an industry-standard for exchanging patient and visit information.

The two primary types of supported documents are patient summaries and visit summaries. Patient summaries represent a nearly current snapshot of a patients chart, while visit summaries contain a patients chart for a specific visit. Visit summaries are considered accurate as of the visit date.

The list below contains a summary of rules for returned data. Learn more details about HL7 standards.

  1. Each participant must populate these required sections with discrete data:
    • allergies
    • intolerances
    • medications
    • problems
    • results
    • vital signs
  2. Each participant must include these required sections with either narrative or discrete data:
    • social history
  3. Each participant should include any of these optional sections with discrete data:
    • procedures
    • immunizations
    • advance directives
    • encounters
  4. Each participant should include any of these optional sections with either narrative or discrete data:
    • family history
    • functional status
    • medical equipment
    • payers
    • plan of treatment
    • social history
    • mental status
    • nutrition
  5. Participants may add any other valid CDA sections (or custom sections) at their discretion.