Circle Health announced it signed up to use CommonWell Health Alliance(R) services to enable health care providers to see patient health data from outside organizations within its Cerner electronic health record (EHR). Patients who receive care at its Lowell General Hospital inpatient and outpatient facilities will be able to give their doctors and nurses access to medical records from outside health care organizations that participate in CommonWell.

"CommonWell's services give us another avenue to put our patients at the center of their care," said Dr. David Pickul, Circle Health chief medical officer. "By enabling our patients to share their medical records with their caregivers from wherever they may have received care is a powerful tool in helping us ensure that our patients get the most complete care possible."

By offering CommonWell services to its patients, Circle Health is breaking through organizational and technological boundaries to advance interoperability and help patients give their care providers a more complete picture of their medical history. CommonWell services are expected to be live in May.

"Circle Health is helping lead the charge for interoperability across health care," said Bob Robke, CommonWell treasurer and Cerner vice president of Network Services. "Our organizations share a common belief that every person's medical record should follow them, regardless of where they receive medical treatment or the type of EHR system that houses their records."

CommonWell was founded by a group of health care IT suppliers committed to advancing interoperability by allowing different systems to work together in order to share patient health data with their care providers. The services offered by CommonWell address four of the key challenges in health care interoperability:

• Patient identification and linking - Assist health IT suppliers to more quickly and accurately identify patients as they transition through care facilities

• Record locator and retrieval - Help providers locate and access their patient 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 - Expected future

capabilities include a patient-authorized means to simplify management of data sharing consents and authorizations

• Trusted data access - Provide authentication and auditing services that facilitate secure data sharing among member systems

Interoperability in health care enables organizations to share patient information regardless of organizational, geographic or technological boundaries. When people can securely share important medical information with providers, they can help improve care quality by giving providers a more complete picture of their medical history.