CommonWell to Expand Interoperability Services

CommonWell Health Alliance, an industry trade group made up of many of several of the largest electronic health record (EHR) vendors, has announced that it expects at least 5,000 provider sites to be live on its services nationwide in 2015.

Already, more than 60 provider sites are live on CommonWell services across 15 states. Now, five of its health IT vendor members—athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway Health and McKesson—are committed to actively deploy CommonWell services to healthcare provider sites nationwide throughout 2015, officials say.

CommonWell’s built-in services include patient identification, record location, patient privacy and consent, and trusted data access. The alliance’s 25 members represent about 70 percent of the acute care EHR market and 24 percent of the ambulatory care EHR market, its officials say. “CommonWell and its members are well on their way to making nationwide interoperability a reality,” said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell. “Member commitment to action is already producing real-world interoperability services, but this expands the benefits of data exchange across the healthcare continuum and across the country.”

What’s more, planned as part of a broader announcement that the company will issue next week from HIMSS, athenahealth will make CommonWell services available, at no additional charge, to its entire cloud network of more than 62,000 providers, serving more than 60 million patients nationwide. Further, Cerner will continue to offer CommonWell services for free to its clients through 2017, after a nominal one-time setup fee, while McKesson plans to make CommonWell services available, at no additional cost, to its entire base of Paragon customers in 2015. according to the announcement.