BOSTON – December 12, 2023—CommonWell Health Alliance celebrates designation of the first Qualified Health Information NetworksTM  (QHINsTM) under the nation’s new Trusted Exchange Framework and Common AgreementSM  (TEFCASM ). TEFCA is a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology program which aims to revolutionize nationwide health data exchange in support of better patient care.

Founded in 2013, CommonWell built an architectural concept for nationwide health care data exchange that aligns with what TEFCA is becoming. Today, the CommonWell network enables the federated exchange of patient information across more than 34,000 provider sites representing 218 million individuals on its nationwide network. To date, it has facilitated the exchange of more than 5 billion healthcare records.

“We think of ourselves as kind of ‘proof of concept’ for TEFCA and so feel a sense of pride watching it roll out. We congratulate the QHINs, the ONC and The Sequoia Project on designation of the first QHINs under TEFCA today and plan to be there shortly ourselves,” said CommonWell Executive Director, Paul L Wilder. “We operate at a huge scale, sharing millions of documents every day. We’re taking the time to make sure we are very deliberate in both launching our new platform and in our QHIN application process on behalf of our more than 70 diverse Member companies. We plan to complete the process in Q1 of 2024.”

“It’s been a privilege to be part of CommonWell since its launch,” said Michael Palantoni, athenahealth Vice President of Product and Platform and member of the CommonWell Board of Directors. “We’ve worked closely with the group to realize the promise of experiential interoperability in healthcare technology – delivering providers the insight they need at the moment of care to treat patients and deliver great outcomes. We look forward to working with Alliance members as we complete QHIN designation under TEFCA in the coming months.”

CommonWell continues to grow. In September it announced a new Technical Service Provider and architecture for a new network platform. The new platform expands services for connected organizations and with TEFCA if designated a QHIN. New member companies including ModuleMD, an electronic health record company, and Solace Health, a care champion organization, have joined recently to get onboard the new CommonWell platform. Current members of the Alliance have begun testing the new platform in anticipation of a Q1 2024 release.

“We’re excited to join a powerful force in the industry and be part of the solution to lessoning barriers for data exchange for the benefit of patients and providers across the county,” said  ModuleMD CEO Abhinay Rao Penugonda. “We did a thorough review of interoperability partners with scale and a robust roadmap for the future including TEFCA and CommonWell was an obvious choice for us.”

To learn more about CommonWell’s TEFCA strategy and what differentiates it as a Candidate QHIN visit commonwellalliance.org/TEFCA.

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About CommonWell Health Alliance

CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of health care and technology organizations working together to create universal access to health data nationwide. CommonWell members 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 and its members are committed to the belief that provider access to health data must be built into information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the populations and people they serve.

To learn more about CommonWell Health Alliance, visit https://www.commonwellalliance.org/. Engage with CommonWell on our blog, as well as through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. CommonWell Health Alliance® and the CommonWell Logo are registered trademarks of CommonWell Health Alliance Inc.

CommonWell Health Alliance Press Contact:

Berit Mansour
Phone: (402) 968-8554
Email: berit@commonwellalliance.org