The CommonWell Health Alliance has added two more companies, Computer Programs and Systems, Inc. (CPSI) and Sunquest Information Systems, to join the organization in its goal of achieving industry wide interoperability.
The two companies are the sixth and seventh companies to join CommonWell, along with members Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway Medical Technologies, and McKesson. McKesson subsidiary RelayHealth is also a member of the alliance, which was formed at this year’s HIMSS conference in New Orleans.
CommonWell is billing itself as a collaborative effort of health IT vendors focused on interoperability and data liquidity between systems. CPSI is a popular supplier of EHR systems to rural and community hospitals. And with the addition of Sunquest, CommonWell has added its first vendor that is solely dedicated to health IT services specific to laboratory and diagnostic facilities.
"We're excited to have CPSI and Sunquest as the next members of our Alliance," Tee Green, president and chief executive officer of Greenway, a founding member of CommonWell, said in a statement. "Health IT providers are best positioned to achieve interoperability by collaborating in ways that can eliminate care inefficiencies and unnecessary costs caused by health data fragmentation. The industry must transform the current segregated and stifled health data landscape into one that creates universal access to relevant consumer information to better coordinate care and improve population health."
CPSI was ranked 43rd and Sunquest was ranked 42nd in this year’s Healthcare Informatics 100 listing.
CommonWell has come under fire from one of the leading EHR vendors in the industry, Epic. In an exclusive interview with HCI, Epic’s Carl Dvorak said, “We’re less interested in commercial endeavors, and more interested in true moves towards national open standards.” In other interviews, Epic’s CEO Judy Faulkner called the endeavor a competitive weapon against the company.
