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So far CommonWell has created 165 blog entries.
28 06, 2018

Advancing Exchange, Driving Change

2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00

Interoperability has always been a cornerstone of MEDITECH’s vision for healthcare IT. And through our partnership with CommonWell Health Alliance®, we’re pleased to be taking another large step for connectivity, by successfully deploying CommonWell interoperability services at Alliance Community Hospital (ACH) in Alliance, Ohio. As the first fully FHIR-enabled CommonWell member, MEDITECH is leveraging the Argonaut Project’s FHIR specifications to both supply and consume C-CDA documents. These interoperability services include patient enrollment capabilities and C-CDA exchange, opening the door for more comprehensive sharing of discrete segments of data in the future, such as medication and allergy data. The Argonaut Project's FHIR specifications work with the C-CDA exchange to provide near real-time access to participating patients’ data. Such capabilities will enable ACH to bridge gaps in care and exchange information seamlessly [...]

Advancing Exchange, Driving Change2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00
27 06, 2018

Welcome to our Newest CommonWell Members!

2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00

Since the beginning, CommonWell has had a clear vision that health data should be available to individuals and providers regardless of where care occurs. Our three newest General Members share this mission, focusing on provider access to health data and improving the delivery of care where it is needed most. Please join me in welcoming our newest CommonWell Health Alliance Members: Aledade Aledade offers a new model of primary care that puts physicians back where they should be: quarterbacking their patients’ health care. Aledade currently partners with nearly 300 independent practices to lead 20 Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) that allow these primary care doctors to thrive in the new value-based world Care Continuity Care Continuity is a care coordination solutions provider working with hospital systems to help navigate patient journeys across [...]

Welcome to our Newest CommonWell Members!2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00
9 05, 2018

2018 Spring Technology Retreat: Building our Future Together

2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00

Each year, several members of the CommonWell Health Alliance technology-oriented committees [Use Case, Standards Technology and Integration Group (STIG), Deployment and Utilization, and Privacy and Security] take part in our Spring Technology Retreat. This year, more than 50 of us came together at MEDITECH in Foxborough, Massachusetts, to share knowledge, learn from one another and collaborate in a meaningful way to advance interoperability as an Alliance. As leaders of the STIG, Deployment and Utilization, and Use Case committees, we especially look forward to this retreat because of the invaluable opportunity it offers for us to sit down with our peers to share opportunities and triumphs of our interoperability efforts while working through solutions together. In our committee working sessions, and as a greater group, we traversed many subject areas over [...]

2018 Spring Technology Retreat: Building our Future Together2023-01-31T04:32:56-06:00
5 03, 2018

Nationwide Care Transitions: Empowering the Provider, Empowering the Patient

2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00

More than 2.5 million passengers fly domestically in the US every day. How many of those people do you think remember to bring their health records with them in case of emergency? While I don’t know of any source tracking that statistic, my personal experience would lend me to believe it is very few. This time of year, it feels like even more people are traveling - holidays, business trips, a welcome escape from this brutal winter. And it also feels like this time of year is when most people come down with a cold, flu or something worse that requires them to seek medical attention. What happens when those two collide – when you are sick or injured while traveling far from home? Most likely you feel out of [...]

Nationwide Care Transitions: Empowering the Provider, Empowering the Patient2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00
1 03, 2018

2018 Update: The Power of Many

2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00

Sometimes I forget that I am the only full-time employee of the Alliance. You can easily see why that is if you read any of our most recent blogs. CommonWell is a community effort, and our members are also our leaders, our innovators and our biggest advocates: Morgan Knochel from one of our newest subscribers – OneRecord – shared her personal journey through the health care system as she became her own patient advocate and ultimately benefited by being one of the first patients to access her health records via CommonWell. MEDITECH, Brightree and Change Healthcare wrote about their leadership in building and leveraging FHIR in their software to exchange data through CommonWell. Nick Knowlton, our membership chair for the past four years and a past and current executive at [...]

2018 Update: The Power of Many2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00
1 03, 2018

Welcome to our Newest CommonWell Members!

2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00

Five years ago next week, five companies announced at HIMSS13 that they were forming a new Alliance focused on breaking down barriers to sharing health data. CommonWell Health Alliance is now nearly 80 members strong with more than 20 care settings represented by our membership. Our membership diversity continues to expand. Today, I am thrilled to share the newest General Members of the Alliance, which extends our membership diversity to new settings of care and provider organizations, including one of the largest health systems in the country. All are notable innovators in their respective fields. Ascension Ascension is a faith-based healthcare organization dedicated to transformation through innovation across the continuum of care. As the largest non-profit health system in the U.S. and the world’s largest Catholic health system, Ascension is [...]

Welcome to our Newest CommonWell Members!2023-01-31T04:32:58-06:00
25 02, 2018

Patient Access: Putting My Binder Back on the Shelf

2023-01-31T04:32:59-06:00

I have a chronic illness. During my diagnosis process, from 2012 to 2014, I carried a four-inch binder to all my doctors’ appointments because none of the specialists I visited communicated with each other or shared records. I had to be the single source of truth for my own medical information; otherwise, tests were unnecessarily repeated and my medical bills spun out of control. When appointments concluded, I would call to request a paper copy of the visit record, pick it up from the office, and add it to my binder. An incredible amount of work was involved in creating my binder. I made sure it was easy to flip through and organized logically. I even created cover sheets to provide doctors with a brief overview of what changed in [...]

Patient Access: Putting My Binder Back on the Shelf2023-01-31T04:32:59-06:00
22 02, 2018

CommonWell FHIR-ing out API requests to MEDITECH

2023-01-31T04:32:59-06:00

As Brightree shared in the previous blog, FHIR offers many advantages over legacy standards and for that reason, MEDITECH is certifying to be CommonWell’s first fully FHIR enabled member; both supplying and consuming C-CDA documents via FHIR APIs. We have opted to certify using RESTful FHIR APIs for ease, speed, and future-proofing. Because FHIR specifies modern file formats like JSON, which pass along their attribute names, developers don’t have to worry about the hierarchy of the data — it can be transferred and received in any order. It also means information can be inspected. A developer can see what information is present and what is missing, so you’ll never mistake a seven-digit ID number for a phone number. A further benefit is that because FHIR is based on common internet [...]

CommonWell FHIR-ing out API requests to MEDITECH2023-01-31T04:32:59-06:00
21 02, 2018

We Didn’t Start the FHIR…

2023-01-31T04:33:00-06:00

With sincere apologies to Billy Joel, the title for this blog is actually very accurate. We didn’t start the FHIR. Modern interoperability is all about standing on the shoulders of giants and the work that comes before you. And that is what FHIR does – it takes many good things that have impacted healthcare interoperability in a positive manner and modernizes the concepts from a transactional and infrastructure standpoint, and from a content standpoint, to enable interoperability to achieve better scalability. You can read how CommonWell has enabled use of the FHIR standard within the CommonWell services in Andrew Wright’s, Change Healthcare, blog post. Why did we at Brightree embrace FHIR for our connectivity with CommonWell and other portions of our interoperability solutions sets? We are writing today to help [...]

We Didn’t Start the FHIR…2023-01-31T04:33:00-06:00
20 02, 2018

Ready, Aim, FHIR! How CommonWell is using FHIR

2023-01-31T04:33:00-06:00

CommonWell and FHIR go way back. We embraced it from the beginning. We were the first network in production with the HL7 FHIR v.0.08 specification for patient identity management in 2014. And a year ago, we became the first network to put APIs into production that conform to the DSTU2 version. But how did FHIR, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, really take root in CommonWell? It’s through the Alliance culture. A culture engineered for collaboration On day one, not all CommonWell members wanted to use the old HL7 v2 PIX solution to provide registration messages to CommonWell. Some advanced members wanted to develop a future-facing solution including REST and FHIR. Also, the Alliance wanted to offer flexibility via multiple onboarding pathways for our members, so we collectively decided to support both [...]

Ready, Aim, FHIR! How CommonWell is using FHIR2023-01-31T04:33:00-06:00
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