CommonWell Health Alliance and The Sequoia Project have opened general availability of an integrated data exchange service they first announced in 2016.
CommonWell Health Alliance is a nonprofit trade association founded in 2013 by several top IT vendors, including Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner and Greenway Health. Since its launch, the alliance has developed and deployed a vendor-neutral interoperability platform called CommonWell.
The Sequoia Project, another leading healthcare interoperability nonprofit, helps healthcare organizations connect to one another through its Carequality Interoperability Framework. As of May, 600,000-plus physicians have used the framework to exchange patient records electronically.
CommonWell and Carequality began to connect the two interoperability systems this past summer using technological infrastructure developed by Change Healthcare, bringing a "handful" of initial providers with Cerner and Greenway Health EHRs live on the connection in July.
Since then, CommonWell-enabled providers have exchanged more than 200,000 documents with Carequality-enabled providers.
The shared service is now available to all of the organizations' members. CommonWell members Brightree, Evident and Meditech are already in the process of subscribing to the connection and are beginning to take it live with their provider clients, according to CommonWell officials.
"We are proud to break down yet another barrier to interoperability by making this much-anticipated connection available to our members and their clients," said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance. "This increased connectivity will serve to empower providers with access to patient health data critical to their healthcare decision-making."