We’re having a great week at Cerner Health Conference, and I wish you could all be here.
I delivered my keynote speech this morning. Thanks for your kind attention and patience with my stream-of-consciousness style. It’s typical that I leave many sentences unfinished. This year, however, due to a personal trigger in the speech, I left an important sentence unstarted.
Cerner will provide CommonWell services to our clients for free until Jan. 1, 2018. We will have a nominal setup fee. CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for profit trade organization which intends to provide its services at a very low cost. The design is for the member health IT company to pass through the cost to the end-user provider organizations. We believe that by providing the service free for three years, it will give your organization the chance to evaluate the service.
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Munck Wilson Mandala Partner Greg Howison shared his perspective on some of the legal ramifications around AI, IP, connected devices and the data they generate, in response to emailed questions.
CommonWell’s core functions are managing a single identity for every person/patient, locating the person’s records in the network and managing consent. Another very important point: CommonWell will NEVER resell data as has been claimed by some. That is a protection that has been built in the organizing principles from the start.
For those who were not here for my keynote, my topic in part was fixing my wife Jeanne’s record—making the case for using CommonWell’s interoperability services to get rid of the need for her to carry bags and bags of records to each and every appointment. Jeanne has been fighting stage IV metastatic breast cancer for six years. Her records have wound up in more than 20 different health organization EMRs as she’s progressed on her “journey” of therapies and surgeries. CommonWell is an attempt to address many of the barriers to solving that problem.
The pilots of CommonWell are over, and we’ve proven that Cerner can safely and securely exchange the right patient records at the right time with any of the CommonWell partners. We are now ready to sign provider organizations up. I predict that CommonWell will become a major interoperability-enhancing utility and network in the years ahead, but like most networks, it will take time to get a large enough mass of users signed up and content flowing to make a real difference.
CommonWell membership remains open to all health IT vendors. Our vendor members will represent 50% of the acute care health IT market by January, a good share of the ambulatory market, plus some great continuum of care partners like CVS Caremark. We’re making great progress on signing new IT vendor members, and we’re hoping to eventually get the overwhelming majority of the health IT industry to join.
