Electronic Health Reporter

Circle Health announced today it signed up to use CommonWell Health Alliance services to enable health care providers to see patient health data from outside organizations within its Cerner electronic health record (EHR). Patients who receive care at its Lowell General Hospital inpatient and outpatient facilities will be able to give their doctors and nurses access to medical records from outside health care organizations that participate in CommonWell.

“CommonWell’s services give us another avenue to put our patients at the center of their care,” said Dr. David Pickul, Circle Health chief medical officer. “By enabling our patients to share their medical records with their caregivers from wherever they may have received care is a powerful tool in helping us ensure that our patients get the most complete care possible.”

By offering CommonWell services to its patients, Circle Health is breaking through organizational and technological boundaries to advance interoperability and help patients give their care providers a more complete picture of their medical history. CommonWell services are expected to be live in May.

“Circle Health is helping lead the charge for interoperability across health care,” said Bob Robke, CommonWell treasurer and Cerner vice president of Network Services. “Our organizations share a common belief that every person’s medical record should follow them, regardless of where they receive medical treatment or the type of EHR system that houses their records.”

CommonWell was founded by a group of health care IT suppliers committed to advancing interoperability by allowing different systems to work together in order to share patient health data with their care providers. The services offered by CommonWell address four of the key challenges in health care interoperability:

• Patient identification and linking – Assist health IT suppliers to more quickly and accurately identify patients as they transition through care facilities
• Record locator and retrieval – Help providers locate and access their patient records, regardless of where the encounter occurred, by providing a “virtual table of contents” that documents available data from each encounter location
• Patient access, privacy and consent management – Expected future capabilities include a patient-authorized means to simplify management of data sharing consents and authorizations
• Trusted data access – Provide authentication and auditing services that facilitate secure data sharing among member systems

Interoperability in health care enables organizations to share patient information regardless of organizational, geographic or technological boundaries. When people can securely share important medical information with providers, they can help improve care quality by giving providers a more complete picture of their medical history.

About Circle Health

Circle Health is a progressive collaboration of physicians, hospitals, other health providers and organizations with a shared vision for empowering people and communities to be healthier. Through innovative programs and a collaborative approach to care management – called Complete connected careSM – Circle Health supports communities with a comprehensive range of services and provides individuals easy access to the expertise and resources to achieve the best possible health throughout their lives. Circle Health is a not-for-profit company and headquartered in Lowell, Massachusetts. For more information, visit circle-health.org.

About CommonWell Health Alliance

CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of health IT companies working together to create universal access to health care data. The Alliance is open to all organizations that are committed to making patient’s data available to providers regardless of where care occurs. Alliance members support the belief that provider access to this data must be built into health information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the populations and people they serve.

To learn more about CommonWell Health Alliance, please visit www.commonwellalliance.org, and read CommonWell Community blog. Also follow CommonWell on Twitter at @CommonWell, join us on CommonWell’s LinkedIn page, and like CommonWell’s Facebook page.

CommonWell Health Alliance and the CommonWell logo are licensed trademarks of CommonWell Health Alliance in the U.S. and other jurisdictions.

About Cerner

Cerner’s health information technologies connect people, information and systems at more than 18,000 facilities worldwide. Recognized for innovation, Cerner solutions assist clinicians in making care decisions and enable organizations to manage the health of populations. The company also offers an integrated clinical and financial system to help health care organizations manage revenue, as well as a wide range of services to support clients’ clinical, financial and operational needs. Cerner’s mission is to contribute to the improvement of health care delivery and the health of communities. On February 2, 2015, Cerner Corporation acquired substantially all of the assets, and assumed certain liabilities, of the Siemens Health Services business from Siemens AG. Nasdaq: CERN. For more information about Cerner, visit cerner.com, read our blog at cerner.com/blog, connect with us on Twitter at twitter.com/cerner and on Facebook at facebook.com/cerner.