Last Thursday, a great man and health IT visionary was laid to rest. The cofounder of Cerner, Neal Patterson worked every day over the last four decades to improve the delivery of health care. One of his greatest passions was to remove the barriers to health data exchange. And as such, Neal was one of the first and biggest champions of CommonWell Health Alliance. When Farzad Mostashari, former National Coordinator for Health IT, discussed the subject in May 2012 at a Bipartisan Coalition meeting, noting that the federal government was legally constrained from implementing an official “National Patient Identifier,” he challenged the group with “you need to solve this problem yourselves.” We took that challenge seriously. Neal was one of the first leaders we talked to about creating an alliance [...]