CommonWell Health Alliance has announced the availability of its cross-vendor interoperability services to the post-acute market.
Brightree, Cerner and McKesson are among the first CommonWell members that have committed to deploying these services nationwide in 2016, according to a press release from the Alliance, which noted that each year more than 10 million Medicare beneficiaries are discharged from acute care hospitals into a variety of post-acute care settings, including long-term care hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing facilities and patients’ homes with services from home health and hospice agencies. More than 66 percent of these Medicare beneficiaries have two or more chronic conditions with 14 percent having six or more, CommonWell said.
As such, a recent Health Affairs study indicated a low level of health information exchange among post-acute settings, particularly the ability to send and receive data. The CommonWell services, which include person enrollment, record location, patient identification and linking, and data query and retrieval, will begin in the first quarter of the year for post-acute facilities.
“This patient population typically requires care from multiple providers in a variety of highly divergent settings,” Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance, said in a statement. “Our collective experience across the continuum can help break down the barriers to cross-vendor HIT interoperability and make a dramatic difference in care coordination among ambulatory, acute and post-acute settings of care, with the ultimate goal of better patient outcomes.“
To date, nearly 4,400 provider sites in all 50 states, the District of Columbia (D.C.) and Puerto Rico have gone live with CommonWell services and an additional 3,500 sites have committed to using CommonWell services in the future. Earlier this month, the Alliance announced that seven new members are joining its effort to enhance nationwide health data exchange.
