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CommonWell TV Kicks Off Today at HIMSS18
For our third year in a row, CommonWell Health Alliance will be helping to bring the HIMSS18 show floor right to your computer screen. Please join us starting today and through the conference as we host CommonWell TV from HIMSS18 in Vegas We have booked interviews on the half hour with different executives from 30 CommonWell exhibiting member companies, as [...]
Nationwide Care Transitions: Empowering the Provider, Empowering the Patient
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 [...]
2018 Update: The Power of Many
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 [...]
Welcome to our Newest CommonWell Members!
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 [...]
Patient Access: Putting My Binder Back on the Shelf
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 [...]
CommonWell FHIR-ing out API requests to MEDITECH
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, [...]
We Didn’t Start the FHIR…
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 [...]
Ready, Aim, FHIR! How CommonWell is using FHIR
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 [...]
Beyond the EHR: Diversity in Our Membership
Five years ago, five health IT leaders from competing companies stood on a stage during HIMSS13 and announced they were coming together to breakdown the silos of health data exchange. I remember standing in that New Orleans hotel ballroom, proud of what my industry was doing and excited for what was about to come. Many openly questioned the likelihood of [...]
