CommonWell Health Alliance shares goals for interoperability
“The current healthcare interoperability world looks like the internet in the 1980s and 1990s,” said Arien Malec, vice president, strategy, RelayHealth and representative of the CommonWell Health Alliance, at a National eHealth Collaborative webinar on July 22.
While back then computers began communicating with each other over limited networks, as the industry evolved the need for broader connectivity, ubiquitous searches, the ability to discover where data are, and secure data exchange across a network held sway and pushed the industry forward.
“In the internet world of 1980s and 1990s, you can connect two computers together, but it doesn’t solve the kind of healthcare problems we need to solve,” he said.
Malec shed light on the ambitions of the CommonWell Health Alliance, a vendor collaboration launched by Cerner, McKesson, athenahealth, Greenway, Allscripts and RelayHealth in March at HIMSS 2013, which he said is working to enable widespread information exchange among disparate scaled stakeholders and bring healthcare into the 21st century.
The launch of the CommonWell Alliance was mired in some controversy because EHR vendor Epic claimed it was not invited to join.
During the webinar, Malec offered some updates on the alliance, as it has been relatively out of the spotlight since its spring launch announcement. He said that this week the initial test environment should be up and running, and that testing with its partners will occur through the rest of the year. Results of the pilot will be unveiled at the 2014 HIMSS conference. By the second quarter of next year, the alliance will open up to the second wave of partners, with expected national deployment in the third quarter of 2014.
Speaking to the alliance today, he said the founding companies account for less than 40 percent of the EHR installations at U.S. hospitals and nearly 25 percent of all ambulatory practices using an EHR. Its tenets include:
- A patient’s data should be available to patients and providers without regard to where or when care occurs.
- Providers should be able to access this data through their native health IT products.
- This ability should be embedded within the system at a reasonable cost to the provider.
According to Malec, its core services will include managing patient identity (although not through single identifiers, he said), linking records across care locations, managing patient consent and delivering peer-to-peer targeted queries. This means “providing access to data critical to get to the broader world that we are seeking,” including population health management, care coordination, helping a parent or loved one enable and manage a patient’s care and the enabling of the next generation of mobile apps, he said.
“The center of our network is around clinical data to improve care and to improve health. That’s the effort we are building out,” Malec said.
Standards to be used by the alliance include IHE profiles (PIX, XCA, SAML and BPPC) and HL7 but they alone cannot drive interoperability, he said.
“Standards are incredibly important, but we also need to get vendors enabling standards and enabling services,” Malec said. “We need to provide linking services so we can enable that link, or power those links, in order to enable the data access."
Responding to the rumors that EHR vendor Epic was not invited, Malec replied: “We can’t get to the world we are getting to with single vendors. We absolutely did invite and meet with key principals with Epic and we continue to invite everybody,” he said, noting that they had met with the top 20 vendors in the EHR industry.
At the present time, the CommonWell Health Alliance is applying for not-for-profit status to form a trade association. “If we intended to keep vendor X or Y out, there is no way legally we could; we’d be violating our not-for-profit status. Anybody who wants in, is in.”