WOBURN, Mass., and Boston, Mass., October 03, 2017 – Today, BridgeHead Software, a leader in healthcare data management, announced it is joining CommonWell Health Alliance® as a General Member to help break down barriers to nationwide data exchange. CommonWell, a not-for-profit trade association made up of diverse health IT stakeholders dedicated to creating universal access to health data via a person-centered, nationwide network.
To achieve this, CommonWell and its members have committed to using their diverse experience across the health care ecosystem to produce and deploy patient-centric interoperability services — including person enrollment, record location, patient identification and linking, and data query and retrieval. At their core, these services aim to solve the challenges associated with patient linking and identity at scale.
CommonWell and its members are actively deploying these services, which are now live at more than 5,300 provider sites nationwide, ranging from large hospitals to rural specialty practices. Furthermore, CommonWell is continually working with its members to extend interoperability to new users and care settings, including patient portals. Recently, CommonWell announced its commitment to work with members to build new application programming interfaces (APIs) that will complement existing services and increase the value of the CommonWell network to individuals and caregivers.
“CommonWell is made stronger by the unique and specific qualities each member brings to our organization,” said Nick Knowlton, Membership Committee chair for CommonWell Health Alliance and vice president at Brightree. “We are excited to welcome BridgeHead Software as we continue to deploy our person-centric interoperability services nationwide.”
BridgeHead’s Independent Clinical Archive, HealthStore®, offers a single, easily-accessible and standards-based software repository for all healthcare data, enabling hospitals to standardize access to key elements of the patient record while simultaneously freeing them from dependence on any single system to locate the information. HealthStore® extends beyond traditional Vendor Neutral Archives to manage the information lifecycle of data across the entire healthcare enterprise, both clinical and non-clinical – whether within a hospital, medical facility or across organizations.
“BridgeHead Software believes that resolving healthcare’s data interoperability challenges is key to sharing information and is excited to be involved in this broad-based initiative with other CommonWell members,” said Jim Beagle, president and CEO at BridgeHead Software. “Our Independent Clinical Archive, HealthStore®, promotes interoperability across healthcare stakeholders and unlocks access to crucial patient data, complementary to the mission of the Alliance. Through the alliance with CommonWell, BridgeHead will also share insights learned in helping hospitals and health systems face the growing challenge of interoperability among multiple applications.”
BridgeHead Software joins the Alliance with the intention to contribute to making interoperability ubiquitous in health care. To date, almost 70 companies are members of CommonWell.
