CommonWell

See the following -

A New Pothole on the Health Interoperability Superhighway

Adrian Gropper | The Health Care Blog | August 15, 2017

On July 24, the new administration kicked off their version of interoperability work with a public meeting of the incumbent trust brokers. They invited the usual suspects Carequality, CARIN Alliance, CommonWell, Digital Bridge, DirectTrust, eHealth Exchange, NATE, and SHIEC with the goal of driving for an understanding of how these groups will work with each other to solve information blocking and longitudinal health records as mandated by the 21st Century Cures Act...

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Accessing & Using APIs from Major EMR Vendors–Some Data at Last!

Matthew Holt | The Healthcare Blog | September 19, 2016

Information blocking, Siloed data. No real inter-operability. Standards that aren’t standards. In the last few years, the clamor about the problems accessing personal health data has grown as the use of electronic medical records (EMRs) increased post the Federally-funded HITECH program. But at Health 2.0 where we focus on newer health tech startups using SMAC (Social/Sensor; Mobile OS; Cloud; Analytics) technologies, the common complaint we’ve heard has been that the legacy–usually client-server based–EMR vendors won’t let the newer vendors integrate with them...

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An Alternative Proposal for Certification

Some have suggested that my comments over the past few months about the Meaningful Use program, MACRA/MIPS, and Certification imply that we should just give up - throw out the baby with the bath water. That’s not what I’ve written.
Here’s a clarification. I believe MACRA/MIPS is the right trajectory - create a set of desirable policy outcomes, then enable clinicians to choose technology, quality measures, and process improvements that are relevant to their practice...

Can Open Source EHRs Offer a New Path for Health IT Usability?

Jennifer Bresnick | Health IT Analytics | March 28, 2017

In an article published in JMIR Medical Informatics, researchers from the University of California-Davis decided to explore the small but intriguing world of open source EHRs, which may fit very neatly into the growing interest in application programming interfaces, FHIR, and other open data standards that encourage customized mix-and-match health IT development without the historical pitfalls of proprietary systems. Using data from 2014, the researchers identified 54 open source projects that met the HHS definition of an electronic health record.  At the time, four of those packages had achieved Certified EHR Technology status from the ONC.

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CommonWell Health Alliance Expands Interoperability Services, Signs Up New EHR Vendors

Carol (Staff Writer) | HITECH Answers | November 25, 2014

CommonWell Health Alliance is a non-profit health IT trade association launched a year ago last March at HIMSS13. The primary goal of the vendor-driven Alliance is to advance interoperability through an open membership program to all organizations...

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CommonWell: Healthcare Interoperability Or Bust

Mark Braunstein | Information Week | January 8, 2015

Peter Bernhardt of CommonWell Health Alliance, a group of clinical and health IT organizations, talks about its goal of better data exchange and application integration...

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Congress is its own roadblock to interoperability

Marla Durben Hirsch | Fierce EMR | April 8, 2015

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT has received a large number of comments on its draft interoperability road map. Some commenters have praised it; others have offered criticisms. Yet, we can't ignore that ONC is not alone at the interoperability drawing board. Both the CommonWell Health Alliance and Carequality, Healtheway's interoperability initiative, are forging ahead with their own initiatives. There also are the health information exchanges, with their different rules, operating models and governance structures.

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Halamka on Enabling Nationwide Interoperability

...recently, the ONC Interoperability Roadmap, recognizing that the building blocks of universal interoperability could not be so neatly erected, leans on the idea of “coordinated governance” of networks. While these frameworks have paid homage to the concept of nationwide network as a “network of networks”, we have yet to crisply define the stitching needed to form this nationwide network quilt. This issue hasn’t been so pressing up until now because there were relatively few networks – the “last mile” problem was the bigger concern. Network formation is evolving rapidly, however, which has made more pressing the question of what it means to connect networks in a uniform way.

Halamka on the Most Important Interoperability Story of 2016

You may have missed or not understood the implications of this press release.  Here's a guest post from Micky Tripathi, the CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative that explains everything you need to know: "This summary provides some additional information on the recently announced interoperability agreement between CommonWell and The Sequoia Project (Carequality).  For full disclosure, I am on the Board of Directors of The Sequoia Project, a contractor to CommonWell, and participated in the discussions leading to the agreement.  The description below does not necessarily reflect the views of either of these organizations or any of the named vendors...

The HITECH Era in Retrospect

John D. Halamka, M.D. and Micky Tripathi, Ph.D. | The New England Journal of Medicine | September 7, 2017

At a high level, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 accomplished something miraculous: the vast majority of U.S. hospitals and physicians are now active users of electronic health record (EHR) systems. No other sector of the U.S. economy of similar size (one sixth of the gross domestic product) and complexity (more than 5000 hospitals and more than 500,000 physicians) has undergone such rapid computerization...

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