Category: CommonWell Health Alliance

What You Should Know:

– New KLAS report finds acute and ambulatory care EMR
vendors Cerner, Epic and NextGen are best at making outside patient data usable
for clinicians (data from outside the clinician’s health system).

– KLAS report examines adoption and usability among advanced
users of the main acute and ambulatory care EMR vendors.

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The national interoperability networks of Carequality and CommonWell Health Alliance have become some of the primary means by which patient records are shared between healthcare organizations in the US. Despite progress in delivering interoperability, the number of providers connected to these plug-and-play networks, and the usability of the shared data varies significantly depending on the EMR in use. The KLAS report, Interoperability 2020 (Acute/Ambulatory) examines adoption and usability among advanced users of the main acute and ambulatory care EMR vendors.

Epic, NextGen, Cerner Best at Making Outside Patient Data
Usable

The report reveals Cerner, Epic and NextGen are the best
acute/ambulatory EMR vendors at making outside patient data
usable for clinicians (data from outside the clinician’s health system). Epic
continued to enhance the end-user experience with its Happy Together solution delivering
the most natural integration of outside data into the clinician workflow,
including the recent addition of basic lab trending.

KLAS named NextGen as the only ambulatory specific EMR vendor
to provide a strong usability experience for all interoperability workflows,
while Cerner customers validated its strong capabilities for accessing and
incorporating a wide variety of outside data into the patient record.

Duplicate PAMI Data a Growing Problem

Customers of both Cerner and Epic say the next step is for
the vendors to reduce the duplication of problems, allergies, medications, and
immunizations (PAMI).

NextGen Healthcare is the only vendor whose customers report
significant improvement in this area. The NextGen EMR is able to filter out duplicate
medications, even for inexact matches (e.g., Tylenol vs. acetaminophen). While
other solutions may be capable of flagging duplicate information and removing
some of it, customers say the process is often still very manual.

Other key findings of the report include:

– athenahealth and Epic continue to lead in overall
adoption, with nearly all customers connected to CommonWell Health Alliance
network.

– Cerner has been encouraging customers to adopt the
CommonWell connection for some time, and over the past 18 months, the number of
customers live has doubled, meaning a majority of clients are now connected.

– NextGen Healthcare has also continued to advocate for the adoption of Carequality among its customer base.

– eClinicalWorks customers have been actively connecting;
their usability experience remains similar to what it was in the past.

– Since early 2019, many organizations have implemented Expanse, but the adoption of CommonWell among MEDITECH customers has increased only slightly (from two customers to eleven).

– Allscripts was a founding member of CommonWell in 2013 but
never connected. After multiple delays and a shift to Carequality, they
connected their first customer (via dbMotion) in the second half of 2020.

What You Should Know:  

– CommonWell Health Alliance enables payer access with the addition of a new service provider, DataFile Exchange to support the operational services specific to the Payment and Health Care Operations use case.

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CommonWell
Health Alliance today announced it is extending its interoperability
services to enable additional use cases beyond treatment and patient access,
starting with Payment and Health Care Operations data requests.

Data File Exchange Background

To support this effort, CommonWell has added a new service
provider, DataFile Exchange, to support the operational services specific to
the Payment and Health Care Operations use case. Together, DataFile Exchange
and Change Healthcare, the technology service provider for CommonWell, will
facilitate the automated exchange of data requests from a broader set of users,
including payers, record locator vendors and other qualified entities.

Why It Matters

Despite strides made in electronic clinical data exchange, existing payments and operations processes providing access to protected health information (PHI) remain archaic, predominantly manual, expensive, error-prone, and time consuming. The additional functionality provided by the new use case aims to end these outmoded processes, improve the quality of care, and drive efficiency across the health care continuum.

DataFile Exchange was founded by Janine Akers, an industry leader in the exchange of PHI. DataFile Exchange will work closely with CommonWell, its members, and Change Healthcare, which continues to act as the CommonWell technology service provider and data broker for the CommonWell network––in addition to building the functionality needed to support Payment and Health Care Operations data requests.

“Improving data exchange of Payment and Health Care Operations is critical, particularly as we look at ways to help our health care system do more with less time and resources,” said Janine Akers, founder and CEO of DataFile Exchange. “DataFile Exchange has broad industry experience with handling PHI, so it’s only natural for us to shift our focus to automating the exchange of PHI. We’re well-positioned to partner with CommonWell in its effort to help patients, providers and payers benefit from these next-level interoperability services.”

Four CommonWell Service Adopters who provide record
retrieval services––Change
Healthcare, Ciox, Inovalon and Moxe Health––currently are participating in
a pilot to refine the use case, with the goal of making CommonWell services for
Payment and Health Care Operations purposes generally available for these underserved
areas in the coming few months.

Today, the CommonWell network enables the federated exchange
of patient information across more than 17,000 provider sites representing 100
million individuals on its nationwide network alone. Combined with its CommonWell
ConnectorTM and collaboration connections like the Carequality Framework,
connected provider sites can exchange data with more than 50,000 clinics,
hospitals, specialty centers and more. To date, more than 790 million health
documents have been exchanged across the CommonWell network.

What You Should Know:

– Fresenius Kidney Care, the dialysis services
division of Fresenius Medical Care North America, rolled out CommonWell health
data exchange services to its dialysis facilities nationwide.

– This initiative is a significant stride towards better-coordinated care for patients requiring life-sustaining dialysis for kidney failure and will enable the real-time exchange of critical patient health information–allowing healthcare providers to access the most up-to-date records when treating these patients with complex health needs.

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Fresenius Kidney Care, the dialysis services division of Fresenius Medical Care North America and the nation’s leading network of dialysis facilities, is deploying CommonWell health data exchange services to all of its dialysis facilities, enabling near-real-time exchange of critical patient health information. With the connection to the CommonWell Health Alliance interoperability network and its bridge to the Carequality interoperability framework, care team members can locate, exchange, and view patient health documents from more than 600,000 providers and 2,800 hospitals across the country.

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National Data Exchange Network

The exchange enables the provider network to access dialysis
treatment records for any patient treated at Fresenius Kidney Care and better
coordinate care with patients’ other participating providers. Because people
living with kidney failure often have multiple comorbidities, many are
routinely treated in other facilities and hospitals outside the dialysis center
making access to health information critical.

The document exchange is made possible within the company’s
existing Cerner technology for managing patient health records. Examples of
health information accessible on the exchange network include discharge
summaries and emergency room visits.

“Ensuring all healthcare providers have the most up-to-date records when our dialysis patients receive care is vital to providing the best treatment and outcomes possible,” said Mike Asselta, President of Fresenius Kidney Care. “By implementing this leading national exchange, we are taking another important step toward better coordinated care for all patients living with kidney failure.”

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Expansion Plans

Fresenius Kidney Care recently began implementing these data
exchange services in select states and dialysis centers and will continue to
expand these services in the coming months. Several studies have shown that use
of health information exchange (HIE) systems can decrease the number of
hospital emergency room visits and reduce readmission rates.

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