> Is this intended for use by providers or consumers/patients?
This currently can only be used by providers, or healthcare IT vendors working with providers. Referring to the post: "using Metriport for patient data exchange today requires a Treatment purpose of use under HIPAA - which means that only Covered Entities, or Business Associates who work with Covered Entities, can use Metriport."
> Authorized providers can use TEFCA through a QHIN to query for treatment purpose of use, which is supported by all participants.
Yes you can query for Treatment, but you won't get meaningful coverage. QHINs do not have nearly enough adoption to be used for Treatment. Essentially the pool of providers using QHINs is insignificant, so you need to go through existing HIEs to get meaningful coverage.
The driving force behind QHINs is to open up new use-cases for accessing patient data, not necessarily to make the Treatment purpose of use better.
> How does your service differ in practice from existing networks of networks
We're the only vendor that's open source, where you can see and trust what's going on under the hood. Ask other vendors how they do record location, patient matching, or data mapping, and they'll just tell you "trust us, we're the best!".
Additionally, we're the only vendor that is confident enough in our solution to work with companies month-to-month, to show them that our product actually brings them value (and works as advertised) in production. Other vendors will lock you into $120k+ yearly contracts before even showing you production patient data. True story: a provider came to us recently after one of the vendors you mentioned locked them into a yearly contract, and only after the lengthly implementation period did they realize the product didn't work well at all - so a bunch of time/money wasted, and they need to migrate now anyways.
We have many advantages feature-wise as well, feel free to compare our dev docs!