CommonWell has been building and scaling a nationwide health data exchange network since 2013. In just under 10 years, it has grown to include more than 80 unique members and build a nationwide network that started with a few thousand provider organizations and now connects more than 27,000. This progress was made possible, in part, to its dedicated members–which represent more than 20 care settings, including market leaders and technology innovators in acute, ambulatory and post-acute care, patient portals, imaging, population health, emergency services, data locator services and more.
CommonWell continues to innovate and thrive thanks to this robust membership. So, every year we talk about these important relationships during CommonWell TV by asking the simple question:
Why did your organization join CommonWell?
At athenahealth, we’re thinking about interoperability at network scale. So, to be part of an organization that operates as a true national network and able to contribute a large number of interactions and data exchange as part of that was critical. And that network-level approach has been key to our engagement with CommonWell since the beginning.
CommonWell and its goals directly align with what we are trying to do at Clinical Architecture – in terms of providing innovative solutions to enable exchange. Knowledge is power, sharing of that knowledge is ever more powerful! And it’s through that exchange and sharing of knowledge that we build trust and hopefully a snowball effect that will benefit many more people than just those that are participating in CommonWell.
We used to say interoperability is a team sport. It’s fundamentally about collaboration and convening discussions amongst competitive organizations. Both CommonWell and DirectTrust share this. Another common thread, the notion of identity. At the beginning of CommonWell, what we really wanted to do is use a strong identity for individuals so that we could move from a notion of probabilistic matching to deterministic matching – that is not something has not yet happened. I think this is a place where can continue to work together to solve the problem.
For ELLKAY, it’s about being able to provide data to our customers to enable them to provide better patient care. We are aligned with the CommonWell charter – it’s all about making data readily available to provide satisfaction.
It’s an easy partnership that was driven by the fact that both organizations have the same shared goal. Both organizations are looking to push forward the potential of interoperability and create that virtual infrastructure across that national exchange of data. So, aligned goals, aligned vision and aligned objectives that we all want the right information in the hands of the caregiver at the right time.
I think everything CommonWell does is very thoughtful and pragmatic – which is critically important for the implementation of technology adoption in health care. It’s a very diverse, incredibly disparate industry – unique to itself. CommonWell brings an amazing thought process to that to truly enable this communication that’s sorely needed.
CommonWell is doing the hard work of working with non-traditional stakeholders to create a common playbook for how the industry can work together. I really think CommonWell is the seed behind TEFCA, proving that it can be effective. CommonWell has enabled us to create a solution that allows us to make it easy to connect to the U.S. health system. We’re focused on making it simple for our customers and we wouldn’t be able to do that without CommonWell.
Part of why our membership is so valuable is because of the synergies we achieve together. WellSky represents over 130,000 post-acute care providers, 5 million caregivers, over 20,000 community and social support organizations. The amount of information we can bring to the network to grow the network is exponential. We recognize because of the breadth and depth of our portfolio we are uniquely positioned to bring a significant amount of information to the CommonWell network.