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 – – it’s not a rare case.
We needed answers now. But for our care team to provide answers, they needed the information routed from the other EHRs. But they couldn’t easily access them.
It there had been a CommonWell at that point, the ability to actually have enabled the right kind of conversations and the right kinds of decision making that we desperately needed, it would have been a totally different experience. And we came with all the resources, all the support and all the education. And all the understanding of the health system and we still couldn’t get that done.
CommonWell isn’t the only tool that’s needed. Health care organizations and accountable care organizations will also need systems that store the longitudinal patient record, normalize clinical data and analyze it. But broad access to CommonWell services, readily available in EHR products, will improve speed, reduce costs and unlock critical information that informs patient treatment decisions.
So, you can imagine the importance of this effort. I am proud to serve as on the CommonWell Board and hope that, in the future, patients battling disease will be able to just focus on getting better – and their health care providers will have the information they need to help them do so.
Hear a bit more from Rich on this topic in the short video below.
Rich Elmore, vice president of Strategic Initiatives – Allscripts, was elected as CommonWell’s vice-chairman of the Board in October 2013.