BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CommonWell Health Alliance® today announced that 14 members have committed to building new application programming interfaces (APIs) that will complement existing services and increase the value of the CommonWell network to individuals and caregivers. The existing CommonWell services, which include person enrollment, record location, patient identification and linking, and data query and retrieval, are all live nationwide.
The new APIs are anticipated to be utilized for a variety of needs across the health and care ecosystem, such as for individuals seeking coverage for disability insurance, for organizations investing in more effective care coordination, or for communities seeking to drive public health programs.
“Although there is still much to be done before achieving the ‘ubiquitous interoperability’ CommonWell Members seek, the collective pursuit of that mission by our Members has created a unique culture of collaboration. That culture is both driving unrelenting execution and yielding innovations that are taking interoperability well beyond basic connectivity,” said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance. “Simply put, our Members want to do more and know that they can do it here, so we’ve secured the processes, guidelines and commitments to jumpstart their progress.”
CommonWell has nearly 9,800 provider sites already committed to using CommonWell core services, including more than 5,000 sites currently live. CommonWell and its members are taking those lessons learned as well as the extensive knowledge and experience of its diverse membership to expand into these new areas of data exchange, including:
Proactive Notifications
CommonWell Members have committed to develop a Notifications API that would enable end-users to be notified when a patient’s data is available on the CommonWell network, enabling a host of valuable use cases serving such diverse needs from post-acute care coordination to care management to public health. Eight Members have committed to building out and utilizing such service, including athenahealth, Audacious Inquiry, CareMerge, Cerner, Health Gorilla, OmniSYS, PatientPing and Philips Wellcentive.
“We see that when the full continuum of providers work together collaboratively – emergency room, hospital, rehab provider, home health agency – patients recover safely and return home after surgery or illness much more rapidly,” said Jay Desai, CEO of PatientPing. “PatientPing is so excited to be a part of the CommonWell initiative to break down existing barriers to true care coordination with the goal of improving care quality and patient outcomes. Together, we can accelerate the movement to bring care coordination across the entire country, in an effort to improve health care quality for all.”
“We are excited to improve care coordination through our partnership with CommonWell,” said John King, CEO of OmniSYS. “With a national pharmacy network of more than 25,000 locations, OmniSYS has an opportunity to improve communication between community pharmacists and physicians. By providing proactive notifications to prescribing physicians for at-risk patients, we can drive better medication adherence and higher adult immunization rates, with clear benefits to patients and public health.”
Life and Disability Coverage
A number of different CommonWell Members are enabling providers to efficiently furnish the clinical chart information needed for individuals to qualify for life and disability insurance coverage. Several Members have committed to building on existing CommonWell services to help individuals exercise more control of their record and to help providers respond promptly, including Alumai, athenahealth, Cerner, Mana Health, the Social Security Administration and WoMBA.
Social Security Administration, one of the largest disability programs in the world, requests about 15 million medical records from almost every health care provider to make decisions on approximately three million disability claims annually. Social Security is leveraging health IT to more quickly obtain the medical records needed to support disability determinations and more efficiently manage that information.
Mana Health, a leader in patient portal technology, is working with patients and life and disability insurance carriers to ensure the efficient availability of patient charts via CommonWell services.
“Mana Health is committed to simplifying EHR data integration as we shift toward a world of higher patient engagement and empowerment,” said Christopher Bradley, co-founder and president of Mana Health. “We’re excited to work with CommonWell to create a service that will speed up the flow of information necessary for patients to obtain the life and disability insurance they desperately need.”
Direct-to-Provider Exchange
Through their technology integration capabilities, a variety of members are creating principles and policies that will enable integration of CommonWell services into the products and workflows of providers that do not use CommonWell-enabled EHRs.
Cerner, Redox Engine and RelayHealth have all committed to expanding provider access to the CommonWell network, regardless of the EHR vendor utilized.
“One of the primary goals of CommonWell is to improve real-world data exchange nationwide,” said Niko Skievaski, CEO of Redox Engine, “To do so, we need to ensure the majority of health care providers have access to the data. Deploying direct-to-provider integration services is the ideal way to make this possible and is vital as we look for ways to continually increase the mutual value of our own network solution and of the network that we have created with CommonWell.”
CommonWell Members have been the drivers of interoperability innovations from its inception. Today’s announcement marks the next era in taking its members’ collective experience and building new services and applications to help improve health data exchange in these underserved areas.
About CommonWell Health Alliance
CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of health IT companies working together to create universal access to health data nationwide. CommonWell members represent two-thirds of the acute care EHR market1 and more than one-third of the ambulatory care EHR market2, as well as market leaders and technology innovators supporting care settings such as post-acute care, imaging, perinatal, laboratory, retail pharmacy, oncology, population health, emergency services and more. CommonWell and its members are committed to the belief that provider access to health data must be built into information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the populations and people they serve.
To learn more about CommonWell Health Alliance, visit www.commonwellalliance.org. Engage with CommonWell on our Blog, as well as through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter using the handle, @CommonWell. CommonWell Health Alliance® and the CommonWell Logo are registered trademarks of CommonWell Health Alliance Inc.
1 KLAS - 2016 Hospital EMR Market Share, May 2016. © 2016 KLAS Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved. www.KLASresearch.com
2 SK&A, a Cegedim Company - “Physician Office Usage of EHR Software” SK&A. February 2016.
