NEWS CENTER / COMMONWELL BLOG
Interoperability
HIMSS14: A Picture Perfect Week
This week on the HIMSS Exhibition floor, one of my former colleagues who swung by the CommonWell Health Alliance booth said to me "HIMSS is like a family reunion." That is so true. You reunite people you haven't seen in years. You meet new friends who are connected to someone you know. And you share stories as you catch up [...]
The Faces for Interoperability: Building consensus to break down silos to deliver high quality care
Everyone has a story when it comes to the complexity of the health care system. Especially when it comes to accessing and connecting health records. But what good is a great story, if you don’t have someone to share it with. That’s why we launched the Faces for Interoperability effort (aka #ForInterop). Through social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook [...]
And Now There are Nine.
It is the first morning of the HIMSS14 exhibition and in CommonWell fashion, we are unleashing BIG NEWS. You may have seen our news reported yesterday of all our service launch clients going live AND expanding our services to additional locations, including national health system, Tenet Healthcare. But there’s more – we are now pleased to report that CVS Caremark [...]
What Interoperability and CommonWell Mean for Rural Health Providers
Our presence in 48 states, and the community hospitals and providers we serve, made the goal of seamless EHR interoperability a top priority for CPSI. The emergence of CommonWell Health Alliance answered the urgent need for patient information exchange and was the driving force in our becoming a member in 2013. Many of CPSI’s customers are located in a rural [...]
Members and RelayHealth ‘Connect’ for the Common Good
There are twenty-seven acronyms in Margalit Gur-Arie’s “History of Healthcare Interoperability.” 27! (That’s nearly 2% of the article.) She keeps a straight face throughout the piece, but it reads almost like a parody—the interop landscape is complicated. Byzantine, even. As you know, the CommonWell Health Alliance aims to straighten this all out. Once health IT systems can communicate seamlessly [...]
Introducing our Board of Directors
As you may have seen this morning, CommonWell Health Alliance is officially an incorporated trade association and with that comes the election of our Board of Directors. As I said in our press release, I am proud and very fortunate to have such a talented group of individuals joining me on the Board. We have been working collaboratively for the [...]
The Business Model for Interoperability
Much of the recent discussion around making interoperability a widespread success has shifted from technical standards and capabilities to business dynamics. In its August report, Principles and Strategy for Accelerating Health Information Exchange and Advancing Interoperability, the Department of Health & Human Services puts it front and center: “Both providers and their vendors do not yet have a business imperative [...]
The Value of Health IT
As an Alliance of health IT suppliers, it is probably pretty obvious that we see tremendous value in the use of IT solutions in the health care system. We have all seen firsthand the benefits an electronic system can deliver for providers, patients, payers, pharmacists, laboratories and the like. And the introduction of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [...]
Put a Face to an Initiative
Merriam-Webster defines interoperability as the: ability of a system to work with or use the parts or equipment of another system. It’s clear that interoperability is important to the healthcare system, but it means something different to everyone – to providers and payers and patients. Ultimately, though, it delivers good things to every stakeholder. So what does interoperability mean to [...]
