CommonWell Health Alliance, a coalition of EHR vendors that debuted at the annual HIMSS conference last winter, has announced the initial sites for the January launch of its interoperability system. Providers in Chicago, Ill., Elkin and Henderson, N.C., and Columbia, S.C., will participate in the pilot, and initial results will be announced at the February HIMSS meeting in Orlando, Fla. More sites in different regions will be announced later in the year, CommonWell said.
The initial communities for the pilot were chosen because many providers there use EHRs marketed by the vendors that belong to CommonWell. Those companies include Allscripts, Athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson, and Sunquest.
The other participant in CommonWell is McKesson subsidiary RelayHealth, which will provide services to the network. RelayHealth, which has considerable experience in developing private health information exchanges, “is currently building the foundational services that enable the members to have peer-to-peer data exchange,” a CommonWell spokeperson said.
The seven founding members of CommonWell represent 42% of the acute-care EHR market and 23% of the ambulatory EHR market. No new vendors have joined the alliance since it was announced. Nevertheless, Justin Barnes, a CommonWell board member and vice president of governmental and industry affairs for Greenway, told InformationWeek Healthcare that he’s confident that more vendors will join as CommonWell proves its value.
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CommonWell’s initial goal, as previously reported, is to provide a reliable patient matching system that can be used by multiple acute-care and ambulatory-care EHRs. Beyond that, Barnes noted, the process of enrollment in the CommonWell system will allow patients to opt in and to control which providers are able to see their data. In most interoperability efforts in the industry, such as health information exchanges, patients don’t have that type of control over their records, he said.
According to the news release, the pilot phase will include:
- Enrolling patients in the service and managing the patient-consent protocol.
- Identifying whether other provider participants have data for a patient enrolled in the network.
- Transmitting data to another provider that has consent to view data on that enrolled patient.
CommonWell is experimenting with some advanced methods for exchanging information across business boundaries. Among them are the Web services profiles of Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE), which are already used within many enterprises, and HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), which provides an alternative way to package clinical summaries. According to one source, CommonWell will also use the RESTful Web services model, a SOAP alternative, for transport.
Date: December 13, 2013