The vendor, Greenway Medical Technologies, already has its users exchanging Continuity of Care Documents (CCDs), which are standardized clinical summaries, with other providers that are using two primary inpatient systems -- Cerner and Epic.
Providers with disparate EHRs can still exchange CCDs via health information exchanges, said Greenway's Justin Barnes, VP of marketing, industry and governmental affairs, but that requires costly interfaces.
In contrast, Greenway's approach -- using "cross-platform exchange between different systems," Barnes told InformationWeek, "could reduce interoperability costs in America by 80 percent to 90 percent. That's what we're trying to do."
Ultimately, establishing a standards-based approach would reduce costs drastically, and employing standards created by the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise industry workgroup would make the sharing of some documents between organizations an easy task.
Read the full report on InformationWeek.com.
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