Recently two of the bigger players working on health data interoperability – Carequality and the CommonWell Health Alliance – agreed to share data with each other. The two, which were fierce competitors, agreed that CommonWell would share data with any Carequality participant, and that Carequality users would be able to use the CommonWell record locator service.
That is all well and good, but at first I wasn’t sure if it would pan out. Being the cranky skeptic that I am, I assumed it would take quite a while for the two to get their act together, and that we’d hear little more of their agreement for a year or two.
But apparently, I was wrong. In fact, a story by Scott Mace of HealthLeaders suggests that Boston Children’s Hospital and its physicians are likely to benefit right away. According to the story, the hospital and its affiliated Pediatric Physicians Organization at Children’s Hospital (PPOC) will be able to swap data nicely despite their using different EMRs.
According to Mace, Boston Children’s runs a Cerner EMR, as well as an Epic installation to manage its revenue cycle. Meanwhile, PPOC is going live with Epic across its 80 practices and 400 providers. On the surface, the mix doesn’t sound too promising.
To add even more challenges to the mix, Boston Children’s also expects an exponential jump in the number of patients it will be caring for via its Medicaid ACO, the article notes.
Without some form of data sharing compatibility, the hospital and practice would have faced huge challenges, but now it has an option. Boston Children’s is joining CommonWell, and PPOC is joining Carequality, solving a problem the two have struggled with for a long time, Mace writes.
Previously, the story notes, the hospital tried unsuccessfully to work with a local HIE, the Mass Health Information HIway. According to hospital CIO Dan Nigrin, MD, who spoke with Mace, providers using Mass Health were usually asked to push patient data to their peers via Direct protocol, rather than pull data from other providers when they needed it.
Under the new regime, however, providers will have much more extensive access to data. Also, the two entities will face fewer data-sharing hassles, such as establishing point-to-point or bilateral exchange agreements with other providers, PPOC CIO Nael Hafez told HealthLeaders.
Even this step upwards does not perfect interoperability make. According to Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, providers leveraging the CommonWell/Carequality data will probably customize their experience. He contends that even those who are big fans of the joint network may add, for example, additional record locator services such as one provided by Surescripts. But it does seem that Boston Children’s and PPOC are, well, pretty psyched to get started with data sharing as is.
Now, back to me as Queen Grump again. I have to admit that Mace paints a pretty attractive picture here, and I wish Boston Children’s and PPOC much success. But my guess is that there will still be plenty of difficult issues to work out before they have even the basic interoperability they’re after. Regardless, some hope of data sharing is better than none at all. Let’s just hope this new data sharing agreement between CommonWell and Carequality lives up to its billing.
