Healtheway, a non-profit collaborative effort for health data interoperability between private and public organizations, has announced its nine founding organizations for the eHealth Exchange initiative. The group includes health IT heavyweight, Epic (Verona, Wisc.), the American Medical Association (AMA), and integrated care delivery provider, Kaiser Permanente (Oakland, Calif.).
The eHealth Exchange (formerly known as the Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange) is a cause focused on enabling secure, nationwide health information exchange (HIE). The other founding groups include a mix of HIE vendors such as the Informatics Corporation of America (ICA), Orion, MedVirginia, and Mirth Corporation, as well as advocacy associations such as the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange(WEDI).
"Those who have worked in health IT over the last decade know that progress comes through consensus," Mariann Yeager, Executive Director, Healtheway, Inc., said in a statement. "Our founding members have committed to hands-on involvement in helping to shape Healtheway's future and collaborating to identify and promote effective and secure nationwide approaches to health information exchange.”
Epic’s participation in this endeavor will spark interest, specifically after the company made pronouncements against the formation of the CommonWell initiative. That initiative was started up by a number of Epic’s competitors back in March. It sparked the company’s CEO, Judy Faulker, to question the motives of those companies and call it a competitive maneuver.
