After two years of operation, the CommonWell Health Alliance, an interoperability group now counting more than two dozen health IT vendor-members, announced the hiring of its first executive director March 25. On Thursday, it publicly announced plans to offer its services to thousands of providers.
Jitin Asnaani took the job after serving as director of technology standards and policy at CommonWell founding member athenahealth. He also formerly worked in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where he led development of the Standards & Interoperability Framework.
Asnaani recently answered some questions from MedCity News via e-mail.
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It seems like an interesting time at the alliance, what with the recent tiff between Epic and other vendors. How do you plan on easing tensions, if one can call it that, between the two sides? Not to make this all about Epic, but they are the market leader, so how important in your mind is it to get them on board, and is the perceived divide as big as it seems to outsiders?
We welcome all organizations who share our mission and vision for making health data available to providers and the people they serve regardless of where care occurs. We hope Epic will join CommonWell as we continue to expand our services nationwide. However, we are confident that we will make some positive and real-world change in the industry with the CommonWell members who have already joined us, as well as those who choose to join us in the future.
What are the biggest priorities for CommonWell this year, and how do you intend on achieving them?
It’s all about scale. CommonWell has grown to 25 members, and our services are currently live in six states at more than 20 provider locations, but we aren’t stopping there. Our focus is on expanding our scale by adding more members and by enabling more provider locations and care facilities to utilize our services.
With regard to interoperability, it seems like the biggest challenges are political versus practical. Is that a fair assessment, and if so, how do you hope to address that going forward?
Actually, I think the biggest changes are practical. Government, the private sector, healthcare providers and health IT industry experts alike can agree that nationwide interoperability is a necessity to improve care delivery and drive down costs. Right now, one of the biggest hurdles is making the operational transition from building multiple point-to-point interfaces to implementing a single interface to a low-cost utility in order to get different systems to more seamlessly exchange health data.
What efforts beyond interoperability has the alliance identified?
We are 100 percent focused on making nationwide interoperability a reality.
Some industry insiders have said CommonWell is more marketing than substance. How would you address those sorts of comments?
I would remind them that within six months of launching CommonWell, we had already built tangible technical services specifications, and within a year of that, we had deployed pilot projects to test and improve those services. This year, with CommonWell at just over two years old, our members are deploying those services nationwide, into real-world care settings such as clinics and hospitals. That’s significant progress, and I’m truly proud to be a part of it.
What efforts will the alliance undertake to draw attention to its efforts outside of HIMSS?
We are laser-focused on expanding our scale nationwide and communicating the progress we’ve made so far, both pre- and post-HIMSS. As we continue to deploy to more geographies, provider locations and care facilities, an increasing number of providers and patients will benefit from these services, and we’re looking forward to seeing that growth continue throughout 2015 and beyond.
Dan Verel contributed to this story.
