CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association dedicated to achieving vendor-neutral nationwide interoperability to ensure provider access to health data regardless of care setting. CommonWell offers patient-matching, and record locator for document retrieval.

As a Contributor Member of the Alliance, MEDITECH has the opportunity to help steer the future direction of CommonWell and provide its clients with access to services that go beyond one EHR system, one healthcare organization, and one community— enabling nationwide connectivity and interoperability. Together, MEDITECH and vendors across the industry are breaking down barriers that have stood in the way of efficient data exchange and achieving cross-vendor interoperability.

Benefits and Features of CommonWell 

Benefits

• Improved access: Interoperability between EHR systems provides nationwide access to relevant patient data between systems from different vendors.
• Coordinated patient care: As patients move between hospitals, doctors, and other providers, their secure, consolidated care histories follow them — allowing for coordinated, improved care.
• Better decision-making: Providers can view the total picture of a patient’s current and historical care, enabling them to make comprehensive, informed care decisions.
• Reduced overall costs: Centralized patient records retrieved through a single, universal interface provide the potential to help lower the costs of EHR access and implementation.
• Better workflow: The query or pull model works behind the scenes inherent in existing workflow.
• Complements existing exchange models in the industry.

Features

• Patient registration: Edge Systems send ADT data to CommonWell to create patient records during the Patient Registration or Historical Interface.
• Enrollment: With the use of Change Healthcare's Patient IDLink application, users enroll patients in CommonWell and can link them to documents, creating a Person in CommonWell.
• Request data and respond to requests: Registration/Enrollment then queries the network for documents, and the EHRs answer queries for the documents.
• Document supplying: Secure FHIR transaction is set for inbound queries and retrieval of information.
• Document security: SAML/JWT assertions are added to outbound HIE transactions.
• Historical ADT interface: Patient Feed will initially populate the CommonWell system with patient identity data used to discover relationships between patient records across the CommonWell network. This will consist of a back-build interface to get historical patients in the CommonWell network.
• Post clinical data into workflows and charts:
  • Document(s) are displayed via notifications in the Nursing Status Board/ED Tracker.
  • Full retrieval occurs in the Acute/ED setting.