Another new member, MEDHOST, which develops technology for patient engagement and departmental workflow, will work toward identifying and linking patients across the community, officials say.

"The missions of CommonWell and MEDHOST are closely aligned, specifically that we both are focused on reducing healthcare costs while improving quality of care," said MEDHOST President Craig Herrod in a statement. "MEDHOST believes in CommonWell and views this initiative as an important strategic step for the healthcare industry as it works to connect communities of care."

"Over the course of the past year we've had more than 400 inquiries from people who want to join and participate," said Elmore. "Our goal is to open this up a lot more, but we're trying to do that systematically, to the point where we can support that broader community."

For the time being, he said, "We're trying to keep a focus in early days on data providers and try to make sure we have that core capability that providers are looking for, that physicians are looking for at the point of care. We're looking for anchor participants that are able to really shape the information that your doc's gonna want to see."

Under most circumstances, of course, the vendors of CommonWell are cutthroat competitors, but during their many face-to-face summits over the past year, with countless conference calls and Skype conversations in-between, they've made some interesting inroads as they worked to set up the committees  – membership, standards/technology/implementation, pilot, marketing – necessary to make this interoperability happen.

The past year has "been a lot of fun," said Scott Stuewe, director of client results at Cerner and the head of CommonWell's program management committee. "There are some things we can't do (as competitors), but anything we could, we did."

For instance, "we created this new open source model for us to use a the enrollment application. That exercise was fun for us, an opportunity to do things you usually can't do with your competitors."


Not that it's necessarily been easy. "Imagine your usual pilot – a vendor, working with someone like Randy and figuring out how the system is going to work," said Elmore. "Here, to pull this off, it had to be a couple CEOs talking to each other and saying, 'We want to collaborate together,' then putting together those IT staffs, those clinical staffs, those technical systems together and getting that all to work."

Still, "the energy and enthusiasm from all participants has been great," he said. "Everyone has been super cooperative. There are some things you can't talk about because you just can't. But in terms of the mission we have, everybody is just dedicated to it and focused on it."

That mission is seemingly simple: "To be able to have the right information at the time when the doc is trying to make a decision. That's the problem we're trying to solve, and we're trying to keep a laser focus on it."