The CommonWell Health Alliance, a group that works to ensure various healthcare providers can easily share patient information, has made f its cross-vendor interoperability services available to the post-acute market.
Healthcare interoperability for the post acute market is a pressing HME industry issue. The alliance noted that each year more than 10 million Medicare beneficiaries are discharged from hospitals into a variety of post-acute settings, such as long-term care hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing facilities, and patients’ homes with services from home health and hospice agencies. Moreover, more than 66 percent of these Medicare patients have two or more chronic conditions, and 14 percent have six or more.1
Bearing that in mind, key CommonWell members Brightree, Cerner and McKesson are among the first that have committed to deploying these services nationwide in 2016.
A statement from the alliance cited data that indicated a low level of health information exchange among post-acute settings, particularly the ability to send and receive data. The CommonWell services, including person enrollment, record location, patient identification and linking, and data query and retrieval, will begin in the first quarter of the year for post-acute facilities.
“This patient population typically requires care from multiple providers in a variety of highly divergent settings,” said Jitin Asnaani, executive director of CommonWell Health Alliance. “Our collective experience across the continuum can help break down the barriers to cross-vendor [healthcare IT] interoperability and make a dramatic difference in care coordination among ambulatory, acute and post-acute settings of care, with the ultimate goal of better patient outcomes.”
Commitment from Key Players
HME software company Brightree, which ResMed is acquiring, plans to deploy CommonWell services to its home health and hospice customers during its next winter release of Brightree Home Health and Brightree Hospice.
“Seamless transitions of care are absolutely critical to improving outcomes and containing cost, and in the brave new world of health care, that simply can’t happen without interoperable exchange of health information,” said Dave Cormack, president and chief executive officer of Brightree. “As an advocate for the effective use of health IT in the post-acute setting, and the first CommonWell member focused solely on post-acute care, we’re thrilled to equip providers with the information they need to be more efficient and provide better patient care.”
Cerner, a Founding Member of the Alliance, will extend CommonWell services to its long-term care client base early this year. A recent pilot study, co-authored by Cerner, found that providing long-term care organizations with access to electronic information exchange helped lower rates for inpatient readmissions and return emergency department visits.
“Our long-term care clients are eager to adopt CommonWell functionality,” said Adam Laskey, senior director of long-term and post-acute care, Cerner. “As care providers become more focused on care coordination, it becomes increasingly important to enable the exchange of clinical health data across the continuum. We are excited to be at the forefront of this industry shift.”
As another founding member of CommonWell, McKesson has focused on the mission of making patient data available to patients and providers regardless of where care occurs. McKesson said it is planning to make CommonWell services available in March 2016 to home health and hospice providers using McKesson Homecar and McKesson Hospice.
“As risk continues to shift to providers, hospitals will rely more on post-acute providers to help gain the efficiency of providing positive outcomes in a lower cost care setting,” said Billie Whitehurst, president and general manager of McKesson Capacity Management. “We’re excited that we’re delivering CommonWell enablement to our home health and hospice customers this spring. It’s part of our overall interoperability strategy to help improve efficiency in health care by connecting the care delivered in every setting.”
To date, nearly 4,400 provider sites in all 50 states, the District of Columbia (D.C.) and Puerto Rico have gone live with CommonWell services, and an additional 3,500 sites have committed to using CommonWell services in the future.