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How EHR sharing speeds up disability applications for patients
Health systems such as Cone Health and Temple Health are collaborating with the SSA and Epic to speed up the disability insurance application process.
Applying for Social Security Disability Insurance, or SSDI, can be a stressful and cumbersome process. Health systems, such as Cone Health in North Carolina and Temple Health, an academic health system in Philadelphia, are working to cut these application wait times significantly over traditional methods by sending medical records electronically through networks such as Epic's Carequality, Oracle and Veradigm.
The Social Security Administration's (SSA's) average processing time can be more than six months, and the agency has more than 885,000 claims backlogged, Cone Health reported.
To alleviate long wait times, health systems are sending disability applications to the SSA through Epic's Care Everywhere interoperability tool, which allows community members, such as health systems, to share health information through point-to-point connections or national trust frameworks, such as Carequality. On the SSA side, software called Medical Evidence Gathering and Analysis through Health Information Technology (MEGAHIT) receives health IT records and conducts data analysis. Care Everywhere and MEGAHIT share data through Carequality and eHealth Exchange, a network of HIEs.
Carequality "allows the data to be sent in a [standard] format that makes it easier for the SSA to find the relevant information about the chart quickly and seamlessly," said Nihit Bajaj, Epic's technical solutions engineer team lead.
"With electronic records transmission, we can quickly obtain a claimant's medical record, review it, and make a determination," the SSA stated on its site. "For claimants who are found to have a disability, this means they get the help they need faster."
More than 300 healthcare organizations were partnering with the SSA as of Feb. 9.
"We've definitely seen a better uptick of momentum for health organizations recognizing that this makes a real difference for the patients, and have started to onboard more groups," Bajaj said.
How the data connectivity helps patients
Interoperability between EHR platforms and the SSA improves patients' health as well as their finances.
"When people with disabilities wait months for benefits, every week matters," Cathy Cochran, chief nursing informatics officer at Cone Health, said in a news release. "By securely sharing medical information with SSA through Epic, we're helping patients get their disability benefits sooner. This will make a direct, measurable difference in patients' lives."
When patients apply for SSDI, the medical records must show proof of a qualifying disability, but when patients submit their own materials, they are likely to omit necessary information, Temple Health reported.
Before the new electronic method, patients would have to collect and compile patient records on their own or wait for them to be mailed or faxed, Bajaj noted.
"Without this method, that would also take them months to reach out to individual organizations, HR departments, and collect that info," he said.
Now, a patient can sign an authorization form called SSA-827. Then the SSA will query healthcare organizations to see if they have a patient record that meets those demographics. Health systems collect the authorizations from the SSA and submit the EHR data in minutes. Before this connectivity, health systems would have to chase down paperwork or charts in different formats, Bajaj said.
Organizations started using this electronic process with Epic 14 years ago, but it has been a slow process to get healthcare organizations on board, according to Bajaj. Now, more than 250 health systems participate through Epic.
Other health systems working with Epic and the SSA to streamline disability benefits include Access Community Health Network in Chicago and Reid Health in Indiana.
Removing friction points in disability applications
The goal of partnering with the SSA to speed up claims was to reduce friction in the patient experience, according to Katie Deschaine, vice president of clinical applications in IT administration for Temple Health.
"People depend on their Social Security disability benefits to live, and so looking at how do we remove friction, how do we improve that patient experience was the driver for us," Deschaine said.
Before, patients would have to fax records or sit on hold with health information management departments. Instead, on the first day of connectivity, Temple Health experienced an 85% success rate with 40 requests processed, according to Deschaine.
With the new process, patients get a faster determination, health systems reduce their paperwork and the SSA receives more complete records, Bajaj noted.
"I think we've really seen the integration help the patient, or at least we've heard it helps the patient, because they don't have to coordinate anything, chase down records or worry about missing something important," Bajaj said. "It all happens in the background."
Without this electronic access, a disability determination could take six to eight months, Bajaj said. Now, it's 50% faster.
The SSA announced on Feb. 11 that it would join the TEFCA network to speed up disability claims. It will use eHealth Exchange as its QHIN. The SSA expects to be live on TEFCA in early spring.
When the SSA joins TEFCA, the disability benefit application process will become even easier as Care Quality connectivity transitions to the TEFCA interface, Bajaj noted.
"Right now, organizations as part of implementing this integration have to create an Excel list of all their facilities and have to maintain that with the SSA," Bajaj said. "And that's one step that wouldn't be required in TEFCA, for example, because SSA will be able to leverage the directory infrastructure that happens in TEFCA."
He added, "As networks like TEFCA continue to mature, we expect these kind of connections to become even more routine across the spectrum."
Temple Health also plans to join TEFCA this year, Deschaine said.
How Temple Health prepared for SSA collaboration
A government shutdown in October 2025 paused the data connection with the SSA, but this gave Temple Health time to prepare, explained Patrick Davin, program director of applications at Temple Health.
"We used that time to get everything squared on our side and made sure that everything was ready to go," Davin said. "As soon as the government came back up, we could jump right into our testing."
When the shutdown ended, the SSA reached out to Temple Health to resume testing. Following successful testing in December, Temple Health went live with the connectivity on Jan. 20, 2026.
For the last year, Temple Health has been focusing on ways to automate processes with payers and partners, such as the SSA, according to Deschaine. She said it's part of a "holistic approach" to address "connection points" in the healthcare system.
Protecting privacy during data exchange for disability applications
When health systems such as Temple Health submit data to the SSA, patients must sign form SSA-827 first to grant the SSA access to their medical records for disability determination, according to Bajaj. Patient authorization through SSA-827 is essential so the SSA can receive medical and educational data needed to review the claim. Patients must authorize this data release under the HIPAA Privacy Rule.
"When a patient is [being taken care of at] Temple, they do sign a consent to opt in to all of our data exchanges, so patients are informed. We do take that very seriously, and patients can opt out if they so choose," Deschaine said.
Temple also uses auditing tools to ensure that access to the health system's data traffic is "appropriate and necessary," she said.
In addition, data is encrypted and authenticated, and it excludes psychotherapy notes, Bajaj said.
Going forward, as health systems adopt this electronic data exchange, it should reduce the backlog of claims for the SSA, according to Bajaj.
"As health organizations opt in to this and see the value it provides for their patients, as Temple has done here, I think we'll slowly carve into that overall backlog of disability claims that need to be processed," Bajaj said.
Brian T. Horowitz started covering health IT news in 2010 and the tech beat overall in 1996.
