Let’s start with: what’s the same?
Formed in 2016, the CommonWell Health Alliance Provider Advisory Council (PAC) ensures that the voices of providers, staff and patients are captured throughout all CommonWell efforts. Over the years, their guidance and counsel has proven to be essential in guiding our interoperability efforts.
At our 2019 Fall Summit, a few representatives from our PAC took part in a panel discussion to share key learnings straight from the providers who use our services the most. To date, it’s one of the most popular and valuable sessions we include as part of the agenda.
For our 2021 Fall Summit, we brought it back hybrid style. Check out a few of the highlights below including these three participants:
- Aaron Miri, MBA, FCHIME, FHIMSS, CHCIO, is the SVP and Chief Digital & Information Officer for Baptist Health System
- William Walders, CIO and Senior Vice President of Operations Support at Health First
- Darcie Peacock, BSW, MS, OTR/L, is CEO of Solace Pediatric Home Healthcare,
Anecdotes paint a picture of a problem, what is one that CommonWell helped solve at your organization?
At my former organization, a surgeon needed additional clinical information on priors—including a knee fracture and multiple hip fractures to name a few—in order to operate on a 96-year-old patient. One of the care locations didn’t use a vendor connected to the CommonWell network, but the operating facility used Cerner and athenahealth. Before the CommonWell network existed, this surgeon would have had to rely on faxing, and not just a few pages of clinical documents, but hundreds. After about a day of mapping, we were able to get him access to the patient’s priors electronically through the CommonWell network. – Aaron Miri
What do you see as the next big need electronically from CommonWell?
Health First has created what they call “Health Villages”— which is essentially a destination for wellness that encapsulates every part of your life. Fitness, wellness, hospitality, groceries, you name it. I want to connect all that together in some novel way. Perhaps connecting all those facets of life presents an opportunity for CommonWell and other interoperability improving organizations. – William Walders
The post-acute care setting is behind acute and ambulatory. What are some of the challenges experienced in the post-acute setting when it comes to data exchange?
I still hear things like “this practice is faxing over 100 pages at a time and cutting off the last 12 pages.” One of the things that CommonWell provides that other solutions do not is the fact that I don’t need buy in before I grab those relevant patient documents. A recent update that has been tremendously helpful is that while grabbing documents, I used to have to manually type in allergies, but now those are coming over automatically. That may seem minor, but these types of changes are taking us leaps and bounds ahead of where we have been historically. – Darcie Peacock
To get to know a few of our PAC members better, including Aaron Miri and Darcie Peacock, visit our recent blog.