CommonWell Health Alliance, a vendor-led effort aiming to facilitate the transmission of data between disparate electronic health record systems, has announced the pilot regions for its interoperability services rollouts.
Starting in early 2014, providers in Chicago, Elkin, N.C., Henderson, N.C., and Columbia, S.C., will test the Alliance's consent-based record-sharing system and will determine the feasibility of its new patient-matching approach. The providers will be responsible for enrolling patients in the service, identifying whether other participating providers have information on a patient at the point of care and transmitting data to approved outside providers.
"Our work in these regions is an important step in the Alliance's commitment toward making patient data available to both patients and providers, regardless of where care is administered," said Jeremy Delinsky, chairman of the board for the CommonWell Health Alliance and chief technology officer of athenahealth, in a news release. "Regions within Illinois, North Carolina and South Carolina were chosen because they provide a good footprint of the Alliance's founding member companies' health IT systems, along with a strong desire among clients to make interoperability a reality. We have the right players on board, and we're eager and committed to improve care coordination through advancing data liquidity."
Participating providers include Chicago Lake Shore Medical Associates – Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation and Lake Shore Obstetrics & Gynecology in Chicago; Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital and Hugh Chatham Family Medicine in Elkin, N.C.; Maria Parham Medical Center and Premier Women's Health Professionals in Henderson, N.C., and Palmetto Health, Midlands Orthopaedics and Capital City OBGYN in Columbia, S.C.
The CommonWell Health Alliance is a non-profit alliance of seven major healthcare software vendors: Greenway, athenahealth, Allscripts, Sunquest, CPSI, Cerner and McKesson. These vendors represent 42 percent of the acute-care and 23 percent of the ambulatory electronic health record market. RelayHealth is the service provider for this HIE effort.
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Health IT Interoperability: How Far Along Are We?