How Much Closer To True Interoperability Is CommonWell?

The CommonWell Health Alliance made waves at HIMSS13 in New Orleans when its founding partners announced they would be banding together to solve the challenge of making their EHR and health IT systems and services interoperable. So what did the vendor association have to say at HIMSS14? In short, it is making headway. “There has been tremendous progress made,” Scott Stuewe, Director of Client Results Executive at Cerner Corporation who heads up the CommonWell Program Management Committee, told EHRIntelligence.com.

That progress fell into three categories or activities that have been crucial in getting a production-ready service into the hands of CommonWell’s pilot provider partners. The first focused on the development of the technology itself with much of the heavy lifting being done by Relay Health. “We all did development of our own to make that technology come together. So that was built in the last year,” says Stuewe.

The second major task was getting all the association’s participating vendors to agree on an organizational structure and operation, which Stuewe claims was no small undertaking...