If we assume 95% of your health care is local (within the 50 miles eHX describes above), is the 5% irrelevant? Our belief is the 5% is often critically important and the effect of ignoring this will have an outsized effect on individuals who already have issues with patient access and the care they can receive.
This problem is especially acute for patients that move a lot or need to travel long distances for care including but not limited to migrants, people living in rural communities, active service and retired veterans, people moving for their education or work, and later moving to live near family, people with more than one home, people traveling distances to receive specialty health care or people simply traveling for leisure or to visit friends and family.
TEFCA was conceived to address all these dynamics. The concept of “comprehensiveness” addresses these dynamics by promising a single on-ramp for nationwide (not region-wide) interoperability. Failing to account for these dynamics undermines the heart of TEFCA.