The big movement that is the CommonWell Health Alliance continues to make waves as it attempts to reach further into the healthcare stratosphere. CommonWell recently announced that its five founding member organizations — athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway Health and McKesson — will actively deploy CommonWell's services to healthcare provider sites nationwide throughout 2015.
According to the organization, more than 60 provider sites are currently live on CommonWell services across 15 states including: Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and Washington.
The not-for-profit organization also said 2015 deployments should "allow" at least 5,000 provider sites to be live on the services nationwide, with services to include patient identification, record location, patient privacy and consent and data access.
"CommonWell and its members are well on their way to making nationwide interoperability a reality," Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell, said in a statement. "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."
Announced at Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference earlier this month, athenahealth is now making CommonWell services available to its entire cloud network of more than 62,000 providers, serving more than 60 million patients nationwide.
"Being interoperable on paper or via system certification alone isn't good enough; we have to take measures to advance actual interoperation across healthcare," said Jeremy Delinsky, chief product officer at athenahealth, Inc.
"We've always considered information exchange capabilities to be inherent within the services we deliver versus something extra to charge for. Making CommonWell instant-on for our clients is the latest extension of how athenahealth is working to ensure information can follow the patient, no matter the care setting or EHR system."
Cerner also has announced several clinics that have added the services through its network, including Circle Health and Wood County Hospital. Since January, Cerner has seen nearly 175 provider sites across 39 states sign up to use CommonWell services with anticipated continued growth throughout the year.
"We're excited to see our clients join us and really lead the efforts in helping make nationwide interoperability a reality," said Bob Robke, CommonWell board treasurer and Cerner vice president for interoperability services.
CommonWell's 25 members represent 70 percent of the acute care EHR market and 24 percent of the ambulatory care EHR market, according to the organization. CommonWell has plans to add additional members and deploy the services nationwide, and develop additional use cases to enable real-world exchange across the care continuum.
