CommonWell, Healtheway Make Dual Announcements at HIMSS

CommonWell Health Alliance and Healtheway, two large industry stakeholder groups focused on health information exchange, both made announcements at the HIMSS14 conference this week in Orlando.

CommonWell, which formed at last year's HIMSS conference in New Orleans, expanded significantly, announcing a formal relationship with Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a company that owns 77 hospitals in 14 states. Tenet has signed a letter of intent to use CommonWell's interoperability services.

"Tenet is committed to advancing technology with our hospitals and health care networks to ensure we're providing the right information when and where it's needed, enabling our providers to increase the efficiency and accuracy in care delivery and improve the quality of care in the communities we serve," Bo McPartland, Tenet's vice president of IS planning and analytics, said in a statement. 

In addition, CommonWell has also added pharmacy company, CVS Caremark and HIT vendor, MedHost as two new members. Last year, CommonWell made an impact at HIMSS when it launched with the inclusion of several well-known electronic health record (EHR) vendors and the exclusion of industry giant, Epic. 

Meanwhile, Healtheway, which many in the industry consider to be a rival to CommonWell and does include Epic, made an announcement of their own at HIMSS14. The group formed Carequality, which is an initiative that will be dedicated to accelerating progress in health data exchange among multi-platform networks, providers, EHR vendors, and HIE providers. It aims to develop and maintain a standards-based interoperability framework to enable data information exchange.

Mariann Yeager, Healtheway’s executive director, said in a statement: “A group of organizations – including many of those most active today in achieving nationwide interoperability – approached Healtheway about serving as the neutral convener for industry stakeholders to come together. Together they will work through implementation-level issues to enable exchange between and among networks. Today, we are presenting a call for action to participate in Carequality and join this effort.”

Along with Epic, Carequality has attracted a diverse array of stakeholders including providers, payers, vendors, and IT companies. The full list of 26 organizations include: 

·        California Association of Health Information Exchanges

·        CareEvolution

·        Community Health Information Collaborative

·        CVS MinuteClinic

·        eClinicalWorks

·        Epic

·        Greenway Health

·        HIElix

·        Hyland Software

·        ICA

·        Intermountain Healthcare

·        InterSystems

·        Kaiser Permanente

·        lifeIMAGE

·        MDI Achieve

·        Medfusion

·        Medicity

·        MedVirginia

·        Mirth

·        Netsmart

·        New York eHealth Collaborative

·        Optum

·        Orion Health

·        Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange

·        Surescripts

·        Walgreens

Carequality has mentioned 16 other organizations that have expressed support. The group says that any organization which joins the effort by April 1st of this year will be considered a founder in the initiative.