MEDITECH to Soon Offer CommonWell Health Alliance Services to Customers

MEDITECH, a Westwood, Mass.-based electronic health record (EHR) vendor, has announced that it is set to offer CommonWell interoperability services early next year.

MEDITECH is already a contributing member of the CommonWell Health Alliance, a trade association of health IT companies working together with the aim to create universal access to health data nationwide. CommonWell Health Alliance was formed to develop and deploy a vendor-neutral platform that enables providers to accurately and securely access patients' data regardless of where care takes place.

Officials of the health IT vendor have noted that usability of CommonWell services is crucial, and MEDITECH is working closely with Alliance members to ensure its services will seamlessly weave into providers' and administrators' workflows. In addition, by leveraging its work with the Argonaut Project, MEDITECH will be among the first members in the Alliance to deploy the Argonaut Project's FHIR specifications to customers, including Find Document References and Retrieve Document resources, opening the door for more comprehensive sharing of discrete segments of data in the future, they said.

"Advancing interoperability initiatives has always been a cornerstone of MEDITECH's healthcare IT vision," Lawrence O'Toole, associate vice president of strategy, said in a statement. "MEDITECH is proud to partner with CommonWell Health Alliance in providing our customers access to the CommonWell network, enabling faster and simpler exchange of protected health data across the care continuum."

In less than four years since its inception, CommonWell went from having seven founding members to more than 60 and growing. In December 2016, CommonWell and Carequality announced they will interoperate; the two organizations collectively represent more than 90 percent of the acute EHR market and nearly 60 percent of the ambulatory EHR market. Today, CommonWell services are live at more than 5,000 provider sites in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico.