When the CommonWell Health Alliance launched at HIMSS13 in March, it made headlines and sent ripples through the healthcare community. However, since then the trade association of EHR and HealthIT companies has flown under the radar for several months, which begs the question: How much closer to achieving true EHR interoperability is CommonWell?
The alliance’s return to scene last week with its announcement of its Board of Directors provided an opportunity to see what it’s been up to. Jeremy Delinsky, CTO of athenahealth and an elected member of the board, spoke with EHRIntelligence.com to discuss the alliance’s efforts as well as what’s on the horizon for CommonWell.
How would you describe CommonWell’s progress so far?
It’s helpful to break it into two different categories of work. The first would be the technical work: working on a specification, building out all of the services in our EMR platforms, and having RelayHealth build out the service to be the backbone for the alliance. And then there’s all the work that we did organizationally to create the alliance, get the governance in place, and establish working committees and getting the alliance in a place where hopefully we can start adding new members once we get through the pilot period. So those two things, those two work sites, come together which is really where we’re focused now, which is getting a pilot up and running this quarter so that we can actually see how the services work in the wild and see what kind of value they’re bringing to providers.
So there isn’t a live system running anywhere?
That’s right. I actually just got back from our connect-a-thon that we did in Denver this week, and at that meeting what we did is many of the EMRs certified against the service where showing sort of how, let’s say from athenaNet, which is an athenahealth EHR system, how it would look from a provider’s perspective to query out into the community and see patient records coming from other platforms. Of course, those were test scenarios. We’re just about all certified and RelayHealth has this service, the broker, up and running and what we’re doing now, we’re all in the process of getting final commitments from our pilot customers.
Is the alliance on track? Is it where it expected to be about six months after it was announced?
We haven’t set a timetable where we have said by Year X we expect to 80 percent of all patients in America to be enrolled. We haven’t laid that out because we don’t know until we see how this works. Do I think that there will be challenges as we try to do this? Absolutely! Some of that will be how do you get providers to adopt and to embrace. We have to prove the value here. Providers understand the value of interoperability even if they don’t use those words (and patients understand the value of interoperability even if they don’t use that word). We will certainly find things that we’re going to want to tweak about the specification and the service because it somehow gets in the way of the provider user experience or that providers become overwhelmed with data. But those are things that we can manage.
Who will be participating in the pilots? What will be the big takeaways from them?
We have several geographies that we’ve settled on and we haven’t released those publicly yet — we will later this quarter. We’ve all done outreach to our clients. Some of us have signed documents and commitments, but it’s now all focused in this quarter to getting this working in a production environment in a very controlled way because we’re going to learn lots of interesting things about what works for providers, what doesn’t, and we’ll continue probably iterating the service and specification through the pilot period.
What’s the timetable for the pilots and making the solution available commercially?
The pilot runs through June 30 of next year, and then what we would move towards is a commercial rollout of the offering. We do want to share at HIMSS this year what we’ve learned in the pilots thus far, so hopefully we will have two to three months under our belts of observing its use and have some interesting things to share at that point. Maybe that period will go on longer if we, say, get new members who choose to sign up at HIMSS — maybe they’ll want to participate in the pilot rather than serve a full-on production model at that point. We’ll be flexible and see what we learn in the early days and what kind of interest we see from other platform providers to join in.
What will take to have widespread EHR interoperability?
To get broad-based rollout will take a lot of time, but you’ve seen very wide adoption when there’s value. E-prescribing is probably the best example in healthcare I can think of where the capability hasn’t been around that long but just about everybody is using it because it providers really clear value. Hopefully, what we’re doing here at CommonWell becomes a sort of analogue to e-prescribing which is now nearly ubiquitous.
Whether it’s CommonWell or CommonWell in combination with lots of other efforts that are underway, having patients’ data make its way through the health system to providers who are treating patients is just going to happen. There’s too much riding on making that happen — whether it be the risk the providers are facing and the needs that they have around managing utilization and population health or the aims of ONC and meaningful use and getting this data flowing. It’s not a question of if it’s going to happen, it’s just a question of when and how fast. And there are lots of people working on it. Source
