Health IT Rivals Team Up to Tackle Interoperability Challenge
Interoperability took center stage Monday at the annual HIMSS Conference in New Orleans with a major announcement from five healthcare information technology (IT) companies.
Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway Medical Technologies, and McKesson, along with its RelayHealth connectivity business, unveiled the new CommonWell Health Alliance, a not-for-profit organization designed to support universal access to healthcare data.
Typically competitors, the companies touted improved quality of healthcare delivery and lower costs as benefits of the new arrangement. According to a prepared statement, the alliance will define, promote, and certify a national infrastructure with common platforms and policies.
The alliance will test elements of its national infrastructure in a local pilot within the next year. The group plans to offer the following services:
- Cross-entity patient linking and matching services
- Patient consent and data access management
- Patient record locator and directed query services
“The formation of this alliance takes healthcare a step closer to broad industry interoperability,” said John Hammergren, chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of McKesson, in a prepared statement. “A national and trusted health information exchange will break down the information silos in health care and should dramatically improve the quality and cost effectiveness of care delivery.”
“Greenway has anticipated this evolution to a smarter health care system based on open collaboration and data flow,” added Tee Green, president and CEO of Greenway. “We’ve been telling caregivers the marketplace can provide it and sustain it, and they are right to expect it. Consumers are no different, and a patient-enabled approach to data access will foster a deeper and more efficient patient-provider relationship.
Word of the nonprofit’s formation comes roughly two months after CEOs of nine device makers pledged to make their devices interoperable, thereby easing access to health data for doctors and hospitals.
The CEOs of Cercacor, Cerner, Dräger, GE Healthcare Systems, Masimo, Smiths Medical, Sonosite, Surgicount, and Zoll made the pledge at the inaugural Patient Safety Science & Technology Summit at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, in California. The event was organized by the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation & Competition in Healthcare with the goal of developing strategies for lowering the number of preventable patient deaths in hospitals, estimated by the Masimo Foundation and others at more than 200,000 each year.
In January, AAMI released a report on medical device interoperability. The report, Medical Device Interoperability: A Safer Path Forward, summarizes the presentations and discussion from a summit AAMI held this past fall with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A free PDF copy of that report is available here.
Posted: March 5, 2013