Eight CommonWell Health Alliance member organizations have committed to supporting patient access to healthcare data. Two say they will make it happen this year.
The CommonWell Health Alliance is going direct to patients.
By the end of 2016, consumers will be able to self-enroll in the CommonWell network, link their healthcare records from wherever they receive care, and browse the data via a variety of online methods.
CommonWell is a not-for-profit trade association of health IT vendors representing two thirds of the acute care and one third of the ambulatory care electronic health records market, as well as other vendors from across the health IT spectrum, including post-acute care, imaging, laboratory, and population health vendors, as well as retail pharmacies.
Eight CommonWell members have announced they will support the initiative; six have not set a specific timeframe for deploying the capability:
- Cerner
- Athenahealth
- Modernizing Medicine
- Aprima Medical Software
- Evident
- RelayHealth, a division of McKesson
Two more member organizations, providers of patient portal and personal health record technology, said they will also support the patient access initiative. MediPortal and Integrated Data Services intend to provide patient access to CommonWell health data by the end of 2016.
The data stored by CommonWell is the core standard clinical chart data set, as typified by the CCDA standard, required for meaningful use, according to CommonWell officials.
CommonWell services are already live on more than 4,700 hospital, ambulatory, and post-acute provider sites, with an additional 3,300 sites committed to using CommonWell services.
While nearly 74% of health care consumers surveyed by patient engagement technology provider HealthMine say easy electronic access to health data would improve their knowledge of their health and improve communication with their physicians, 53% of patients surveyed said they cannot access their data online.