CommonWell Health Alliance

See the following -

CommonWell Is A Shame And A Missed Opportunity

Adrian Gropper | The Health Care Blog | March 6, 2013

The big news at HIMSS13 was the unveiling of CommonWell (Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway and RelayHealth) to “get the ball rolling” on data exchange across disparate technologies. The shame is that another program with opaque governance by the largest incumbents in health IT is being passed off as progress. Read More »

CommonWell Members to Build Healthcare APIs to Expand Service

Kate Monica | EHR Intelligence | February 15, 2017

CommonWell Health Alliance is set to expand as its existing services with agreements from 14 new members committed to building new healthcare application programming interfaces (APIs) for the health data exchange platform. “Although there is still much to be done before achieving the ‘ubiquitous interoperability’ CommonWell Members seek, the collective pursuit of that mission by our Members has created a unique culture of collaboration,” said Executive Director Jitin Asnaani...

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CommonWell Plans EHR Pilot; Denies Data Will Be For Sale

Scott Mace | HealthLeaders Media | June 4, 2013

A joint effort to provide interoperability among the electronic health records systems of competing vendors is proceeding without a great deal of transparency and openness outside of the participating members. Read More »

CommonWell Wants To 'Open This Up'

Mike Miliard | Healthcare IT News | March 14, 2014

In the year and 10 days since it was launched in New Orleans, the vendors of the CommonWell Health Alliance have been setting up the infrastructure for their vision of cross-competitive data liquidity. Now it's time to see what that interoperability can accomplish for the patient.

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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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Data Management: Precision Agriculture Can Learn From Healthcare

Kelby Kleinsasser | PrecisionAg | May 2, 2013

In my brief foray into Healthcare Information Technology (IT), it took only a couple of weeks to discover that the challenges they faced were harshly reminiscent of what we’re facing in Ag Information Technology. Read More »

DeSalvo: Health IT Needs To Catch Up With Other Sectors

Greg Slabodkin | Health Data Management | December 4, 2014

The healthcare industry needs to catch up with other industries in fully leveraging information technology to drive innovation and advancements in care delivery, according to Karen DeSalvo, M.D., acting assistant secretary for health and national coordinator for health IT...

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Epic Systems Says Alliance Between Electronic Health Records Vendors Caught It By Surprise

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes | March 5, 2013

In a bid to put a private sector stamp on the push for interoperability, a group of electronic health records vendors led by Cerner and McKesson formed the CommonWell Health Alliance yesterday. Read More »

Greenway Founding Member Of Carequality Data Exchange Initiative

Press Release | Carequality, Greenway | February 24, 2014

Greenway® is joining more than two dozen healthcare organizations representing providers, retail health, health information exchanges, health information technology, payers and other multi-platform networks in founding and supporting roles of Carequality (“care-e-quality”) during its launch at the Healthcare Information Management and Systems Society Annual Conference and Exhibition (HIMSS14) in Orlando. Read More »

Group of Electronic Health Record Vendors To Become Officially Interoperable

Zina Moukheiber | Forbes.com | June 10, 2014

A group of electronic health record vendors that announced to much fanfare plans to facilitate the exchange of patient data more than a year ago, will start rolling out that facility to their customers this summer...CommonWell Health Alliance members, which include Cerner, McKesson, Allscripts, athenahealth and Greenway, have embedded within their software code that allows health care providers to find and share a patient’s medical information, wherever it might be...

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Growth Slow for CommonWell Alliance Data Exchange Effort

Joseph Goedert | Health Data Management | August 25, 2015

Five Pacific Northwest clients of electronic health records vendor Cerner have joined the CommonWell Health Alliance that offers health information exchange. The new clients demonstrate growth of the alliance while at the same time showing some of its continuing weaknesses. Read More »

Halamka Evaluates Blockchain for Health Information Exchange

Yesterday, I read a New York Times article about a possible successor to Bitcoin called Ethereum, which provides a distributed database (no central repository) for the purpose of tracking financial transactions. I immediately thought of the challenge we have turning silos of medical information into a linked, complete, accurate, secure,  lifetime medical record. Might blockchain technology be useful in healthcare?   I posted the question to my colleagues, Arien Malec (VP, Data Platform and Acquisition Tools at RelayHealth and the new Chair of the HIT Standards Committee) and David McCallie (SVP of Medical Informatics at Cerner).

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Healtheway Convenes Carequality To Take HIE To Next Level

Tom Sullivan | Government Health IT | February 24, 2014

What will it take to ratchet health information exchange up to the next level? The answer pretty much anyone paying attention would fire back: interoperability. Which is not to suggest that will be easy. Read More »

HHS Releases Landmark Report: Reforming America's Healthcare System

On December 3, 2018, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an extensive, 120-page report on the administration's proposals to reform the healthcare system. The report, titled Reforming America's Healthcare System Through Choice and Competition, is divided into four major sections. The report that government policy of the last few years has suppressed competition, increased prices for healthcare, and limited choices for consumers. Though rich in detail as it tries to prove each of these points, the more than fifty recommendations are often broad and aspirational rather than practical. Since I am not a health economist, I will leave the market issues to others to discuss (many of the ideas in this report have been vetted and discussed by others previously). But there are two sections of the report which make direct mention of Health IT.

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