InterSystems announced the launch of InterSystems HealthShare Managed Connections, a service that enables healthcare organizations to take advantage of a network of connections to a vast number of patient records via a central hub and exchange data easily. Through the HealthShare Managed Connections hub, participants can exchange information in a safe, controlled, reliable, and efficient manner.
Most healthcare organizations today rely on one-to-one connections to their partners and to national networks. InterSystems is taking the approach of “build once, use many” to create connections which keep pace with changing requirements and standards.
The HealthShare Managed Connections hub transforms healthcare interoperability with faster onboarding as well as easier maintenance, time, and cost to connect healthcare data. The HealthShare Managed Connections vendor-agnostic connectivity means it doesn’t compete with national networks; it complements them.
Woodlock
“HealthShare Managed Connections allows users to connect to each other as well as to vast national networks, ultimately providing interoperability in a reusable and economical fashion that benefits everyone,” said Don Woodlock, vice president of HealthShare. “This central hub makes it easier to create a single, unified patient record and drive better healthcare outcomes.”
As a CommonWell Connector product, HealthShare Managed Connections empowers users with the ability to access the CommonWell Health Alliance network—representing more than 15,000 provider sites and 76 million individuals.
Through CommonWell, users have the added benefit of being able to leverage the Carequality Interoperability Framework, further increasing access to patient health information. To date, the CommonWell network has more than 219 million health records accessible for exchange, and on average, exchanges more than 70 million health-related records per month.
Brightree has announced plans for its home health and hospice customers to access more than 50,000 provider locations and health systems nationwide via the CommonWell Health Alliance, a nonprofit national trade association of health IT companies, and through CommonWell to Carequality, a national, consensus-built common interoperability framework.
Traditionally, home health and hospice agencies obtained critical patient health data manually from each of a patient’s other care providers. This required significant resources and often resulted in large gaps in patients’ records, hindering the speed and quality of care patients received. Through CommonWell, Brightree home health and hospice customers will be able to quickly and easily retrieve documents and data from a patient’s previous hospital and physician visits within their EHR solution. They can also share patient updates with physicians and other providers in the CommonWell network who serve that patient. This seamless information exchange will help home health and hospice agencies improve their efficiency, as well as patients’ care coordination and quality of care.
“What this amounts to is a smoother journey for patients moving from care setting to care setting, which is traditionally difficult to navigate,” said Nick Knowlton, Brightree vice president of business development and CommonWell board vice chair. “Our customers can now help provide a better experience more efficiently, which can lead to improved outcomes. By including this service in Brightree’s EHR offering, we are helping create a better future for our providers and patients.”
“Our mission at CommonWell is to break down longtime technological and process barriers so individuals and caregivers can access important health data efficiently, affordably and securely,” said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance. “We’re thrilled to be welcoming a new wave of home health and hospice providers into the network, and commend Brightree for its leadership in this space.”
In a forthcoming Brightree survey, 60 percent of referring providers say they would select a post-acute care delivery partner based on their ability to interoperate with the referral source.
“Fluid data exchange is so critical to successful patient management across a system of care, and Brightree is leading in this space,” said Denise Schrader, MSN, RN, NEA-BC, vice president of integrated services at Mosaic Life Care in Saint Joseph, Mo., a Brightree customer.
Guest post by Robert Williams, MBA/PMP, CEO, goPMO, Inc.
Robert Williams
I continue to view 2016 as a shakeup year in healthcare IT. We’ve spent the last five plus years coming to grips with the new normal of meaningful use, HIPAA and EMR adoption, integrated with the desire to transform the healthcare business model from volume to value. After the billions of dollars spent on electronic health records and hospital/provider acquisitions we see our customers looking around and asking how have we really benefited and what is still left to accomplish.
All politics is local
Our healthcare providers are realizing their clinical applications, specifically EMR vendors, are not going to resolve interoperability by themselves. When the interoperability group, CommonWell formed in 2013 much of the market believed the combination of such significant players (Cerner, Allscripts, McKesson, Athenahealth and others) would utilize their strength to accelerate interoperability across systems. Almost three years late CommonWell only has a dozen pilot sites in operation.
Evolving HL7 standards and a whole generation of software applications are allowing individul hospitals to take the task of interoperability away from traditional clinical applications and creating connectivity themselves.
Help wanted
Black Book’s survey published last month, stated that three out of every four hospitals with more than 300 beds are outsourcing IT solutions. Hospitals have been traditionally understaffed to meet the onslaught of federal requirements. Can they evolve into product deployment organizations as well? Across all the expertise they need within the organization? Most are saying no and searching out specialty services organizations to supplement their existing expertise and staff.
Are you going to eat that?
Patient engagement is on fire right now at the federal level (thank you meaningful use Stage 3), in investment dollars and within the provider
community. But to truly manage hospital re-admissions and select chronic diseases (diabetes, obesity and congestive heart failure for example)
providers need data and trend analysis on daily consumer behavior. The rise of wearable technology and the ability to capture data/analyze data from them will be a major focus going forward. These technologies will likely help to make us healthier but with a bit of big brother side affect.
CommonWell Health Alliance announces the addition of five new members enhancing the association’s nationwide footprint, share of the EHR marketplace and diversity across the care continuum. MEDITECH, Merge and Kareo join as contributing members while PointClickCare and Surgical Information Systems (SIS) join as general members.
With the addition of these new members, CommonWell membership now represents 70 percent of the acute care EHR market and 20 percent of the ambulatory care EHR market. CommonWell membership also represents market leaders in imaging, perinatal, laboratory, retail pharmacy, oncology, population health, post-acute care and others across the care continuum.
“We know it takes collective experience and dedication to break down barriers to nationwide data exchange, so we are especially pleased to welcome these industry innovators to the CommonWell family,” said Nick Knowlton, Vice President of Business Development at Brightree and CommonWell Membership Committee Chair. “Each organization will contribute to our effort by providing a commitment to action and new perspectives for additional use cases that will help us accelerate our current deployment of real-world interoperability services.”
• MEDITECH is one of CommonWell’s largest members to join since inception. It provides fully integrated technology solutions for hospitals, ambulatory care centers, physicians’ offices, long term care and behavioral health facilities, and home care organizations. MEDITECH’s membership increases CommonWell’s share of the acute care market from 50% to 70%.
• Merge is a leading provider of enterprise imaging, interoperability and clinical systems that seek to advance health care. It offers solutions in radiology, eye care, cardiology, orthopedics and clinical trials—all of which provide the opportunity for CommonWell to develop new use cases across a broader spectrum of the health care continuum. Additionally, Merge has the most complete radiology solution on the market, from small-volume sites up to the largest practices and chains in the country.
“Merge embraces the opportunity to join CommonWell at a critical moment in health care,” said Steve Tolle, Chief Strategy Officer at Merge Healthcare. “Industry leaders must actively come together to make interoperability real, and the Alliance provides an effective platform for meaningful dialogue and collaboration to help chart the future trajectory of the health care industry.”
• Kareo brings more than 30,000 providers and 60,000 users of its cloud-based medical office software suite into CommonWell. As CommonWell continues to deploy services nationwide, Kareo’s ambulatory experience and reach will accelerate universal provider access to critical health care data.
Brightree has announced plans for its home health and hospice customers to access more than 50,000 provider locations and health systems nationwide via the CommonWell Health Alliance, a nonprofit national trade association of health IT companies, and through CommonWell to Carequality, a national, consensus-built common interoperability framework.