The acute-care and ambulatory EMR market has made significant progress toward "plug-and-play interoperability," or linking providers to a central national network, according to a KLAS Research report.
The report, published Dec. 4, tracks the market's progress since March, when KLAS Research released its last interoperability report. The health IT research firm's findings focus on plug-and-play connectivity, which refers to an EHR vendor's ability to integrate its product into a single national network that clients are able to participate in and access data from.
In November, healthcare interoperability nonprofits CommonWell Health Alliance and The Sequoia Project opened availability of an integrated data exchange service, which has been a major driver of recent advancements in plug-and-play connectivity. The service enables providers on the CommonWell platform to share patient data with providers on The Sequoia Project's Carequality Interoperability Framework.
Since launching a pilot of the service in July, CommonWell-enabled providers have exchanged more than 200,000 documents with Carequality-enabled providers.
Today, almost all major EMR vendors are connected to the integrated service, according to KLAS Research. Athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, eClinicalWorks, Greenway Health and Meditech are all connected to CommonWell, and athenahealth, Epic, eClinicalWorks, NextGen Healthcare and Virence Health are all connected to Carequality.
Allscripts and MedHost are two of the major EMR vendors who are not live on either service, according to KLAS Research. Allscripts has committed to set up connections in the first quarter of 2019, which will roll out to select systems, such as its TouchWorks EHR. MedHost does not have any connections to date, although it has been a member of CommonWell since 2014.