What You Should Know:
– CommonWell Health Alliance enables payer access with the addition of a new service provider, DataFile Exchange to support the operational services specific to the Payment and Health Care Operations use case.
CommonWell Health Alliance today announced it is extending its interoperability services to enable additional use cases beyond treatment and patient access, starting with Payment and Health Care Operations data requests.
Data File Exchange Background
To support this effort, CommonWell has added a new service provider, DataFile Exchange, to support the operational services specific to the Payment and Health Care Operations use case. Together, DataFile Exchange and Change Healthcare, the technology service provider for CommonWell, will facilitate the automated exchange of data requests from a broader set of users, including payers, record locator vendors and other qualified entities.
Why It Matters
Despite strides made in electronic clinical data exchange, existing payments and operations processes providing access to protected health information (PHI) remain archaic, predominantly manual, expensive, error-prone, and time consuming. The additional functionality provided by the new use case aims to end these outmoded processes, improve the quality of care, and drive efficiency across the health care continuum.
DataFile Exchange was founded by Janine Akers, an industry leader in the exchange of PHI. DataFile Exchange will work closely with CommonWell, its members, and Change Healthcare, which continues to act as the CommonWell technology service provider and data broker for the CommonWell network––in addition to building the functionality needed to support Payment and Health Care Operations data requests.
“Improving data exchange of Payment and Health Care Operations is critical, particularly as we look at ways to help our health care system do more with less time and resources,” said Janine Akers, founder and CEO of DataFile Exchange. “DataFile Exchange has broad industry experience with handling PHI, so it’s only natural for us to shift our focus to automating the exchange of PHI. We’re well-positioned to partner with CommonWell in its effort to help patients, providers and payers benefit from these next-level interoperability services.”
Four CommonWell Service Adopters who provide record retrieval services––Change Healthcare, Ciox, Inovalon and Moxe Health––currently are participating in a pilot to refine the use case, with the goal of making CommonWell services for Payment and Health Care Operations purposes generally available for these underserved areas in the coming few months.
Today, the CommonWell network enables the federated exchange of patient information across more than 17,000 provider sites representing 100 million individuals on its nationwide network alone. Combined with its CommonWell ConnectorTM and collaboration connections like the Carequality Framework, connected provider sites can exchange data with more than 50,000 clinics, hospitals, specialty centers and more. To date, more than 790 million health documents have been exchanged across the CommonWell network.
