What is TEFCA?
The Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is a U.S. federal framework designed to enable nationwide, standardized, and trusted exchange of health information.
TEFCA establishes:
A common legal and technical baseline for health data exchange
Rules governing who can exchange data, for what purposes, and under what conditions
A framework that supports both organizational exchange and patient-authorized access
The goal of TEFCA is to reduce fragmentation across health information networks while strengthening trust, transparency, and accountability.
Why TEFCA matters
For years, healthcare interoperability relied on a patchwork of networks, bilateral agreements, and custom integrations. TEFCA introduces a single national framework intended to simplify and scale interoperability.
From a regulatory and enterprise perspective, TEFCA:
Reduces legal and contractual complexity across networks
Enables consistent access rules nationwide
Expands patient access rights in a standardized way
Raises expectations around auditability, governance, and compliance
TEFCA is not just a technical initiative—it is a regulatory and operational shift in how healthcare data is accessed and exchanged.
TEFCA and Patient Access
A core component of TEFCA is support for patient-authorized access to clinical records.
Under TEFCA-aligned workflows:
Patients can authorize access to their health information
Data may be retrieved from multiple participating organizations
Access must be governed by clear consent, identity verification, and auditing requirements
While TEFCA enables access, it does not guarantee data usability. Patient-accessed data is often incomplete, inconsistent, and difficult to interpret without additional normalization and intelligence.
Where organizations struggle
Enterprises supporting TEFCA-aligned access often encounter challenges such as:
Complex identity and consent workflows
Variable data quality across sources
Inconsistent clinical depth and formats
Difficulty delivering data in patient-friendly and system-ready forms
Increased compliance and audit requirements
Meeting the letter of TEFCA is achievable.
Meeting the spirit of TEFCA—usable, trustworthy access—is harder.
How Trove supports TEFCA-aligned access
Trove is designed to support TEFCA-aligned patient access workflows with enterprise rigor.
Trove enables organizations to:
Retrieve patient-authorized data under TEFCA-aligned exchange patterns
Orchestrate identity resolution and consent workflows
Normalize patient-accessed data across sources
Deliver data in FHIR-ready, application-ready formats
Maintain compliance-ready audit logs and traceability
Trove does not replace TEFCA.
It operationalizes TEFCA in production environments.
Beyond compliance: making TEFCA usable
Regulatory compliance alone does not create value.
Trove applies clinical intelligence across patient-accessed data to:
Construct longitudinal patient views
Provide human-readable summaries for transparency
Enable downstream reuse for analytics, care coordination, and applications
This ensures patient access data is not only compliant—but understandable, actionable, and trustworthy.
Who this matters to
This page is relevant for:
Compliance and legal teams evaluating TEFCA-aligned solutions
Enterprise buyers supporting patient access mandates
Digital health and consumer platforms enabling patient data access
Innovation teams building TEFCA-enabled experiences
Trove’s role in the TEFCA ecosystem
Trove operates as a clinical data intelligence layer within TEFCA-aligned workflows.
We focus on:
Making patient-authorized access operational at scale
Reducing downstream data risk
Digital health and consumer platforms enabling patient data access
Access is mandated. Intelligence is optional—but decisive.
TEFCA sets the rules. Trove makes them work.
Trove enables organizations to support TEFCA-aligned patient access with enterprise-grade governance, data quality, and usability—without building and maintaining fragile custom pipelines.
Trove operationalizes TEFCA by transforming patient-authorized access into compliant, usable, and standards-ready clinical data—at enterprise scale.
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