Clinical Data Contribution Policy

Updated February 11, 2024

The national networks Zus participates in rely on a give-to-get model to function, where organizations that query data on a patient must also contribute their own clinical records for that patient. Starting December 31, 2024, TEFCA will specifically require that organizations contribute treatment records that they maintain on patients they query, as scoped by the data elements listed in USCDI v1.

Before you begin enrolling or querying patients through Zus, you must have an integration in place to write this data to us (or directly back to the network via your EMR). If you are interested in retrieving network data for a pilot of while developing an automated integration, supplying records manually is an option.

We recommend contributing the following types of data based on your level of engagement with the patient:

Relationship with Patient	Newly attributed patients that are not yet engaged	Actively outreaching, but no clinical encounters	Have had 1+ clinical encounters
Data to contribute	Care Plan with plans for engaging patient by a specific date and information about the care model	Details on each outreach attempt If patient schedules appointment, write the appointment to Zus	Encounter summary, historical encounter and chart information
When should I contribute data (ongoing)?	When you query data or enroll the patient	Within 24 hours of each outreach attempt or of scheduling each appointment	Within 24 hours of closing an encounter
When should I contribute data (manual)?	When you query data or enroll the patient	Once a week	Once a week
What formats are acceptable?	FHIR PDF or CDA Flat file	FHIR (outreach, appointment) PDF or CDA Flat file	CDA (recommended) PDF FHIR

Zus conducts ongoing monitoring to validate compliance with this policy. If we notice that your integration has broken or stopped supplying records, we will engage you and provide a 5-business-day window to resume data contributions. To protect our customers and our own ability to stay connected to the network, customers who cannot resume data writes within 5 business days will be disconnected from the networks until the integrations in question have been fixed.

We understand that writing this data may require an effort from your technical teams; as such, we are offering a number of pathways to help alleviate this burden.

Initiator only: If your EMR offers a connection to CommonWell, Carequality, and eventually the TEFCA QHINs, and contains documentation for all of the patients you are querying, you may leverage this pre-existing connection to directly contribute data and set up your Zus connection as “initiator only”.
Zus integration: If you use Elation, Healthie, Canvas, or athenahealth as your EMR, you may leverage our integration to satisfy the requirements. We recommend athenahealth customers leverage the ‘on behalf of’ pathway.
Direct write: Customers that do not have a viable EMR integration option must contribute data directly to the Zus Platform. We can accept data in FHIR, C-CDA, and PDF formats through our APIs.
Services: Zus can ingest flat files from your system, transform the data, and write it to our APIs. Our Customer Success team can provide specs and (if applicable) services pricing for this work.