Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare has signed a letter of intent with the vendor-led interoperability effort CommonWell Health Alliance.
The CommonWell Health Alliance is a non-profit alliance of seven major healthcare software vendors focused on improving interoperability between disparate electronic health record systems. Tenet will be making use of the Alliance's patient identification and matching, record locator and document query and retrieval services.
"Tenet is committed to advancing technology with our hospitals and healthcare networks to ensure we're providing the right information when and where it's needed, enabling our providers to increase the efficiency and accuracy in care delivery and improve the quality of care in the communities we serve," said Bo McPartland, Tenet's vice president of IS planning and analytics, in a news release. "We look forward to working with CommonWell in breaking down the health data silos that exist today."
The 77-hospital Tenet joins providers from Chicago, Elkin, N.C.; Henderson, N.C.; and Columbia, S.C., four cities that became test areas for the interoperability effort in December.
The Alliance is a coalition of seven major health IT companies: Greenway, athenahealth, Allscripts, Sunquest, CPSI, Cerner and McKesson. These vendors represent 42 percent of the acute-care and 23 percent of the ambulatory EHR market.
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