As a founding member of CommonWell Health Alliance®, McKesson is dedicated to the mission of making patient data available to patients and providers regardless of where care occurs. As healthcare providers are asked to bear more of the risk associated with patient care, there is an even greater need for truly coordinated care. McKesson EHR solution Paragon® helps users leverage CommonWell services to unlock patient data across disparate Health IT systems and settings of care.

Sixty-three McKesson clients have contracted for CommonWell interoperability services to help break down the barriers that currently prohibit efficient patient data exchange. Floyd Memorial Hospital (New Albany, Indiana), Carroll Hospital (Westminster, Maryland), and Regional Medical Center (Manchester, Iowa) are the first of McKesson Paragon clients who will deploy CommonWell services to securely exchange healthcare data with other organizations nationwide that are part of the Alliance. These organizations share the common mission to advance interoperability initiatives and the belief that healthcare data should be made available beyond one’s own system or community.

McKesson and other CommonWell members are committed to ensuring that the ability to access CommonWell network services is built in to their EHR products. These CommonWell services include:

  • Patient identification and linking: Assists health IT suppliers to quickly and accurately identify patients as they transition through care facilities
  • Record locator: Helps providers locate and access their patients’ records, regardless of where the encounter occurred, by providing a “virtual table of contents” that documents available data from each encounter location
  • Patient access, privacy and consent management: Delivers a patient-authorized means to help simplify management of data sharing consents and authorizations
  • Trusted data access: Provides certification, authentication and auditing services that facilitate consistent trusted data sharing among member systems

“We plan to utilize Paragon to securely exchange patient information with other CommonWell partners,” said Daniel Eichenberger, CEO, Floyd Memorial Hospital. “Delivering better coordinated care as our patients move along the continuum of care from one setting to the next, is just one of the many benefits we anticipate. By providing a complete picture of the patient record within our providers’ Paragon workflow, we will be able to access additional relevant patient data, which inherently facilitates better informed decision-making for our staff.”

“We are very excited to help lead an initiative we believe will promote better health by making it easier for healthcare providers to share and receive patient data,” said Nimesh Shah, president, McKesson Enterprise Information Solutions. “It is our goal to facilitate strong adoption of CommonWell services as part of our overall interoperability strategy to help improve the way healthcare is delivered, enabling each of us to begin experiencing the vision of truly connected care.”

In an industry with multiple standards and hundreds of platforms, no single supplier can solve the problem of interoperability. A collaborative effort by health IT suppliers including McKesson and over 30 other vendor members of the Alliance; along with service provider RelayHealth, are focused on achieving data liquidity between systems. McKesson encourages all HIT suppliers to join in this effort. To date, the Alliance already has over 6,000 provider sites enrolled and that number is expected to grow exponentially by the end of 2016.

About CommonWell Health Alliance

CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of Health IT companies working together to create universal access to healthcare data. The Alliance is open to all organizations that are committed to making patient’s data available to providers regardless of where care occurs. Alliance members support the belief that provider access to this data must be built into health information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of healthcare providers and the populations and people they serve.

About McKesson Corporation

McKesson Corporation, currently ranked 11th on the FORTUNE 500 list, is a healthcare services and information technology company dedicated to making the business of healthcare run better. We partner with payers, hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies and others across the spectrum of care to build healthier organizations that deliver better care to patients in every setting. McKesson helps its customers improve their financial, operational, and clinical performance with solutions that include pharmaceutical and medical-surgical supply management, healthcare information technology, and business and clinical services. For more information, visit us at www.mckesson.com. To sign up for McKesson’s Better Health 2020™ blog updates, visit www.betterhealth2020.com.