Rich Elmore Archives - CommonWell Health Alliance

Celebrating a year of collaboration, achievements and innovations

CommonWell2023-01-31T04:37:09-06:00

It hardly seems possible that it was 16 months ago when I stood on stage alongside the CEOs of athenahealth, Cerner, Greenway and McKesson to announce this industry-led endeavor for interoperability. As with many things, it seems like such a short time to have accomplished all that we have. The now nine members of the CommonWell Health Alliance really have made amazing progress since we announced at HIMSS in March 2013. We welcomed new founding members representing important healthcare segments such as lab (Sunquest) and rural/community/critical-access hospitals (CPSI). We welcomed new contributing members representing other critical segments such as pharmacy (CVS) and psychiatric/behavioral/LTAC (MedHost). We published services and use case specifications, launched services at 14 sites in four communities and enrolled more than 10,000 patients in the CommonWell database. And [...]

What CommonWell Health Alliance is Doing is Personal and Its Important

2023-01-31T04:37:17-06:00

Patients need this. I know personally how important work like CommonWell's can be to patients in the health care system. I'd like to share a brief personal story. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer a little more than a year ago. It was a tough year - very challenging. We were facing life or death decisions and needed our care team's guidance. The care team consisted of a primary care doctor in a private practice that had one EHR, a surgical oncologist in a private practice on another EHR, a medical oncologist using yet a third EHR, and a second opinion team in a totally different geography that had a fourth different EHR. This is the real world of fragmented care delivery and dispersed geographies that we live in [...]