Tenet Signs On With CommonWell Interoperability Effort

Tenet Healthcare Corp., with 77 hospitals in 14 states, will use the interoperability services of CommonWell Health Alliance, which seven technology companies formed in early 2013 to cooperate on systems interoperability issues. Founding members of CommonWell are Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson and Sunquest, with McKesson’s RelayHealth unit providing the health information exchange platform. These members, according to the alliance, represent 42 percent of the acute care electronic health records market and 23 percent of…


Tenet Healthcare Corp., with 77 hospitals in 14 states, will use the interoperability services of CommonWell Health Alliance, which seven technology companies formed in early 2013 to cooperate on systems interoperability issues.

Founding members of CommonWell are Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson and Sunquest, with McKesson’s RelayHealth unit providing the health information exchange platform. These members, according to the alliance, represent 42 percent of the acute care electronic health records market and 23 percent of the ambulatory market.

In December, the vendors announced initial provider organizations in four regions that would roll out early services from the alliance. In Chicago, two group practices with a referring relationship and with privileges at Northwestern Memorial Hospital--multi-specialty Chicago Lake Shore Medical Associates and Lake Shore Obstetrics & Gynecology--started to exchange health information using the alliance’s services.

Also, all four Palmetto Health hospitals in Columbia, S.C., participated in data exchange with ambulatory practices Midlands Orthopaedics and Capital City OBGYN. Hospitals also are participating in North Carolina, with Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital and Hugh Chatham Family Medicine exchanging data from disparate EHRs in Elkin, and Maria Parham Medical Center sharing information with Premier Women’s Health Professionals in Henderson.

CommonWell has published the services and use case specifications that provide detailed information on the initial core services, standards and workflow. Tenet has signed a letter of intent to become by far the largest provider yet to work with CommonWell. In particular, Tenet will work with the alliance to bring in the next phase of functionality including patient identification and matching, record locator, and document query and retrieval services.

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