The electronic health record vendors in the first series of CommonWell Alliance pilots include Allscripts, Athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson, RelayHealth and Sunquest. Testing will begin January 1.
CommonWell Alliance announced Wednesday three regions in Illinois, North Carolina, and South Carolina where pilot testing of its cross-vendor EHR interoperability services will commence January 1.
Participating providers include Lake Shore Obstetrics & Gynecology in Chicago; Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital in Elkin, N.C.; Maria Parham Medical Center in Henderson, N.C., and Midlands Orthopaedics and Palmetto Health, both of Columbia, S.C.
The electronic health record vendors in this first series of CommonWell pilots are provided by CommonWell founding companies Allscripts, Athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson and Sunquest. RelayHealth, a co-founder, is providing health information exchange services between participating EHRs.
According to CommonWell, RelayHealth and the participating provider sites will be validating a patient-centric identity and matching approach, as well as a consent-driven record sharing and retrieval process across care facilities.
Specifically, the initial participating providers will support the launch by enrolling patients into the service and managing patient consent protocol. They will identify whether other provider participants have data for a patient that is enrolled in the network when the patient is at their setting of care, and transmit data to another provider that has consent to view data on that enrolled patient.
Initial use cases will focus on ambulatory practices, although data exchange between a broader range of healthcare systems is expected over time.
CommonWell plans to announce preliminary results from the initial service launch at the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in February. The initiative was announced at the last HIMSS conference in early 2013, and numerous other vendors are in a queue for CommonWell.
"We do expect customers to put this into productive use, and we get all the associated benefits from testing this in a live environment, volume testing, and validation of all the technical components working as expected," says Walter Reid, vice president of product management at McKesson.
Those pilot sites using McKesson software are using a specific version and release level of the software which is CommonWell-ready, Reid says.
"It's a record locator service for patient identity management," Reid says. "EMR vendors have committed to build this into their workflow, so the member firms are also delivering to the customer product changes to show how we're incorporating the CommonWell services into the actual workflows. It's not just a technology component. There are software changes on the vendor side as well."
CommonWell's consent management technology allows patients to authorize data sharing across participating providers.
CommonWell's announcement was accompanied by several prepared statements by participating providers.
"We know firsthand how the lack of seamless data flow between clinicians can be a challenge in delivering excellent care. Palmetto Health has patients that interact with a number of different providers," stated Tripp Jennings, M.D., system vice president, medical informatics officer of Palmetto Health. "We are pleased to be part of this interoperability effort with CommonWell because breaking down health data silos and having patient health data available to providers, no matter the setting of care, will improve quality and the patient experience."
"Despite tremendous advances in electronic health records, communication among diverse systems is poor," stated AnnMargaret McCraw, CEO of Midlands Orthopaedics. "We've signed up for CommonWell because we believe that achieving true interoperability among EHRs is fundamental to improving healthcare."
Still unknown are details of the fees expected to accompany CommonWell services once commercially deployed.
"Part of what we want to do is learn from this experience, [and] figure out the value proposition firsthand by working with customers," Reid says. "There's a backlog of requests for us to work through additional vendors that want to collaborate and participate with the alliance, so that's a next step."
Scott Mace is the former senior technology editor for HealthLeaders Media. He is now the senior editor, custom content at H3.Group.