McKesson sites to start using CommonWell to share information

The McKesson Corp. recently announced that it will use CommonWell Health Alliance to make patient information available to health care providers no matter where the patients receive care.

This is a step in the direction of providing coordinated care across the system. Providers will use McKesson’s program, Paragon, to access patient information in CommonWell through Health IT systems.

McKesson currently has 63 clients that have signed on for the CommonWell service. Floyd Memorial Hospital in New Albany, Indiana, Carroll Hospital in Westminster, Maryland, and Regional Medical Center in Manchester, Iowa will be the first of McKesson’s clients to use Paragon to securely exchange data in CommonWell with other clients nationwide. The thought process is that health-care data should be made available outside of just one system or community.

CommonWell services include helping providers identify patients quicker and more accurately to help them transition to different facilities, easily locate and access patient records from a “virtual table of contents” no matter where the records were entered into the system, management of privacy and authorization from patients to access of their content by providers, and certification, authentication and auditing services that will help with secure access of data by members of the system.

McKesson is a founding member of CommonWell Health Alliance, a not-for-profit trade association of Health IT companies working together to create universal access to health-care data.