CommonWell Health Alliance, a nonprofit trade group made up of large EHR vendors aiming for industry-wide interoperability, has added new members.
MEDITECH, Merge and Kareo will join the group as contributing members while PointClickCare and Surgical Information Systems (SIS) join as general members. CommonWell, which just named a new executive director, says that by adding these members, it now represents 70 percent of the acute-care EHR market and 20 percent of the ambulatory EHR market. The one major holdout for CommonWell is Epic Systems (Verona, Wisc.). The two sides have been notoriously squabbled with each other.
MEDITECH is one of the largest vendors to join the alliance since it started in 2013. According to CommonWell, getting the Westwood, Mass.-based company's membership means its acute-care EHR market representation shot up 20 percent. Merge (Chicago-based) is a large imaging vendor, Kareo provides medical administrative software, PointClickCare is for the long-term care and nursing market, and SIS provides health IT to a specialty market.
“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,” stated Nick Knowlton, Vice President of Business Development at Brightree and CommonWell Membership Committee Chair.
