For the third year in a row, MEDITECH proudly hosted the CommonWell Health Alliance Annual General Meeting and Fall Summit last week at our Joanne Wood Conference Center in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The annual Member gathering provides a valuable opportunity to gather and reflect on the many achievements the Alliance and its members have attained throughout the year.
Each year, I am impressed with the level of collaboration and unity across healthcare leaders to make nationwide interoperability a reality. It’s exciting to see the Alliance’s continued growth — in just four years, the Alliance has grown from seven founding members primarily focused on acute and ambulatory EHRs to 70+ Contributor and General Members representing more than 20 care settings.
This year’s Summit was unique in that my welcome/opening remarks were broadcasted through Facebook LIVE. As I shared, the Alliance is making great strides for efficient and secure patient data exchange. To date, more than 5,500 provider sites are live, with many members sharing their plans to increase deployment to their clients in the coming year. I reiterated MEDITECH’s commitment to offer CommonWell services in early 2018. We’ll also be the first member to deploy the Argonaut Project’s FHIR specifications to supply documents to CommonWell, following the Alliance’s and its members’ leadership in FHIR use.
Throughout the two-day Summit, CommonWell members discussed ways to continually improve upon usability and accessibility of CommonWell, as well as increasing the number of deployments to providers and expanding service directly to individuals.
Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell, said it best during the Summit: “The Alliance can’t be a ‘check the box’ organization.”
Our work as members is not done when we commit to joining the Alliance. We must continue to harness our collective areas of expertise to develop and deliver CommonWell services to improve data sharing across providers, vendors and geographies, ultimately improving health outcomes.
Advancing interoperability initiatives has always, and always will be, a cornerstone of MEDITECH’s healthcare IT vision. We are proud to partner with CommonWell Health Alliance in enabling faster and simpler exchange of protected health data across the care continuum.
This post originally appeared on the CommonWell Health Alliance blog.
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