A little more than one year after a group of EHR CEOs kicked off an interoperability initiative to make themselves a more effective rival to EPIC, the CommonWell Health Alliance has plans for a broader roll out of its technology this summer, according to a Forbes article. The initiative uses a software code that allows health care providers to find and share a patient’s medical information, with the patient’s permission.
About 12 hospitals from Illinois, North Carolina and South Carolina have been taking part in the initiative. Here’s one example of how it works. A physician practice using, an EHR platform from Cerner could access EHRs from patients referred from a primary care physician practice on athenahealth or Greenway. The idea is to provide a seamless flow of information.
Although each of the EHR members could charge for the service, Cerner takes the view that it’s better to grow the number of customers using the system to make it worthwhile. “To have value, it has to have ubiquity,” Scott Stuewe who is director of client results and a member of CommonWell’s committee told Forbes. “The goal of Cerner is to make this a no drag to clients in terms of adoption like an ATM network, which banks subsidized. In order for the world to change, we need to support it in the beginning.”
Market Trends to Watch for Health Systems and Their Specialty Pharmacies
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.
It’s encouraging that the private sector is making progress on interoperability and I hope it will continue. Considering EPIC has decided to go down its own alliance path, its marketshare will help it assimilate more information from its pharmacy partner.
But in the context of the ONC’s scaling back of Meaningful Use ambitions, its report projecting interoperability by 2024, and what’s entailed by healthcare facilities to make interoperability happen, it seems like interoperability is a dream in healthcare that’s destined to never be fully realized.
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