CommonWell Health Alliance

The CommonWell Health Alliance is an independent not-for-profit trade association organization open to all health information technology (IT) vendors devoted to the simple vision that a patient’s data should be available to patients and providers regardless of where care occurs. Additionally, provider access to this data must be built-in to EHR technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of healthcare providers and the patients they serve.

The CommonWell Health Alliance plans to promote and certify a national infrastructure with common standards and policies and will ensure that products that display the CommonWell Health Alliance seal have been certified to work on the national infrastructure. Among the early core components of the national infrastructure, CommonWell Health Alliance will define and promote the following core services and standards:

• Patient Linking and Matching - Provide a way for vendors to identify patients as they move from setting to setting, in a robust and seamless industry-wide data environment.
• Patient Access and Consent Management - Foster a HIPAA-compliant, patient-controlled means to simplify the management of consents and authorizations for data sharing.
•     Record Locator Service and Directed Query - Enable providers to match the locations of a patient’s previous health care encounters, no matter where the encounter occurred, and gain access to that data in an industry standard way.