CommonWell Executive Director Jitin Asnaani to Step Down

Aug. 2, 2019

Jitin Asnaani, executive director of the CommonWell Health Alliance since 2015, has announced that he will be leaving the organization in the coming months.

CommonWell, a trade association providing a vendor-neutral platform and interoperability services for its membersmost of which are electronic health record (EHR) vendors—was founded in 2013 with the overarching goal to improve healthcare interoperability. Six years later, the organization’s officials say, its platform is being used to exchange tens of millions of patient charts for tens of millions of unique individuals across the U.S.

Last year was a landmark one for CommonWell, which announced last August that it had started a limited roll-out of live bidirectional data sharing with an initial set of CommonWell members and providers and other Carequality Interoperability Framework adopters. Carequality is a national-level, consensus-built, common interoperability framework to enable exchange between and among health data sharing networks.

This was a big step for interoperability progress, as together, CommonWell members and Carequality participants represent more than 90 percent of the acute EHR market and nearly 60 percent of the ambulatory EHR market. More than 15,000 hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare organizations have been actively deployed under the Carequality framework or CommonWell network, according to officials.

Essentially, enabling CommonWell subscribers to engage in health data exchange through directed queries with Carequality-enabled providers, and vice versa, has resulted in levels of connectivity that officials attest have not been seen before in healthcare.

Asnaani, who has spearheaded much of this work on the CommonWell side, wrote in a blog post that in his final months, he “will remain focused on driving CommonWell forward—while setting the stage for someone new to transition into this immensely impactful and satisfying role.” He added, “CommonWell is in solid shape and operationally prepared to embrace a new leader. We also have more innovative offerings on the horizon, so I’m confident CommonWell will continue to build off the incredible progress its accomplished to date.”

Asnaani did not announce where he’s going next. He has a background in public and private interoperability efforts, and came to CommonWell from health IT vendor athenahealth, where he headed up product innovation and interoperability. Before that, he was involved with technical standards development at the Office of National Coordinator (ONC), product management at a health IT startup and strategy consulting at Deloitte.

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