CommonWell Marks its 10th Anniversary as TEFCA Gets Underway

The following is a guest article by Paul L Wilder, Executive Director, CommonWell Health Alliance.

Nationwide Interoperability: It’s been a concept, a term bandied about for a while in various forms, but for those of us who have worked in health IT for more than a few years, we know that it has taken a long time for transformational change to be felt by the providers and the individuals they serve. It has also required that resilient individuals and organizations stay focused.

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT’s Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) is indeed an instance of transformational change. Just a few weeks ago, CommonWell was announced as one of six applicants—along with eHealth Exchange, Epic TEFCA Interoperability Systems, Health Gorilla, Kno2 and Konza— accepted to continue in the onboarding process to become a Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) under TEFCA. Once designated and in production, QHINs will serve as on-ramps to the network of networks across the nation that will make TEFCA function. You could feel the energy at the February 13 announcement event at Hubert Humphrey Building in Washington D.C. — I feel it throughout the industry now. Functionally, TEFCA is just getting started, but the concept is years in the making and CommonWell has long been a supporter.

Similarly, while CommonWell Health Alliance started as a mere concept, this month we mark our 10th anniversary. To commemorate this milestone, we’re highlighting the progress we’ve made, celebrating the partnerships forged and getting inspired to tackle what’s next.

How CommonWell Started

The Alliance’s inception was announced at HIMSS13 to a shocked audience – a small group of competing health IT companies stood before the crowd and asserted that working together was the way towards better interoperability for the United States. I still remember being with a New York State HIE at the time, on the HIMSS13 floor, and being asked by a reporter to speculate about what it meant. I was excited then and now I am the proud Executive Director of CommonWell.

When it was announced on March 4, 2013, CommonWell was still just a concept, but by December of 2013, a pilot program was in place to test its interoperability services at four provider sites across Illinois, North Carolina and South Carolina. By November of 2014, CommonWell launched its services nationwide. In December of 2015—less than 2 years after inception—more than 1,200 provider sites across 49 states were live on CommonWell Services.

How it’s Going

Today, CommonWell has more than 70 member companies collaborating for the common good.

Members have deployed CommonWell services throughout all 50 states, Washington, D.C and US territories including Puerto Rico.

Our network connects 34,000 provider sites, includes more than 194 million unique individuals and has shared 3.5 billion documents to date. Today, we facilitate the exchange of 30-40 million documents each week across the nation.

We’re building the next generation of FHIR into our services—and looking ahead to create new use cases for care settings that are still untapped.

Our Record Locator Service technology allows a provider organization linked to CommonWell to search the entire nationwide network in real time to gather comprehensive patient data—not just data from a limited geofenced location—a quality that is important to TEFCA succeeding at scale.

We have come a long way from that announcement 10 years ago.

2023 & Beyond

CommonWell is committed to supporting the industry move towards interoperability. The architectural concepts espoused by TEFCA are very much in line with how the Alliance has been operating since its launch, so we’re thrilled to take the next step along with our coopetitors as we build the next generation of interoperability and continue our quest to become one of the QHINs under TEFCA.

In addition to getting ready for TEFCA, CommonWell will be focused on FHIR, data accuracy, duplication and normalization. We need to go beyond making connections and make sure the data going through the pipes contains useful information organized in a way that helps providers work to the best of their ability – the right data at the right time to serve their patients and themselves.

Taking the Road Less Traveled

Heath data interoperability is hard. I’ve been known to say sometimes it feels like a bit of a slog. But we owe it to ourselves to pause and think about where it all began. Sometimes, hard things need to be done because we choose to do them.

In 2013 many thought the industry was not ready, but we did not postpone the work because it seemed impossible. We did it anyway because the only way to make the impossible into the possible is to get working on it.

To learn more about CommonWell membership visit https://www.commonwellalliance.org/how-to-participate/membership-information/. To learn more about CommonWell and TEFCA visit https://www.commonwellalliance.org/tefca/.

About Paul L. Wilder

Paul is Executive Director of CommonWell Health Alliance, a not-for-profit trade association devoted to promoting health data interoperability nationwide. During his tenure, CommonWell has grown strategically, now facilitating the exchange of 30-40 million documents nationwide each week. Paul has worked for 20 years in health IT, including at Philips Interoperability Solutions, the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), McKesson, Fujifilm Medical Systems and GE Healthcare. He received his MBA from New York University and holds two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania—in Economics and Biomedical Science. CommonWell was recently approved to continue the onboarding process to become among the first networks to function under the nation’s new Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA)—another step forward in CommonWell’s mission to expand connected care across the United States

CommonWell is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

   

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