Last year at HIMSS13 in New Orleans, the Commonwell Health Alliance made a big interoperability splash revealing itself as a coalition of six vendors coming together to advance interoperability between their EHRs.

Whereas Commonwell members are all EHR vendors, Carequality is “a more neutral convener,” allowing HIEs, providers, and vendors to participate, said Justin Barnes, vice president of government affairs at Greenway which is a member of both Carequality and Commonwell.

"We want a private solution to interoperability," Barnes said, adding that Commonwell and Carequality are more complementary than competitive. "The federal government is asking for it, but we are demanding it. We want to get out in front of it."

Indeed, Healtheway is the public-private collaboration that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT and the Federal Health Architecture spun out of Nationwide Health Information Network Exchange work — which Yeager points to as evidence that the industry reached a critical juncture at which HIE had enough traction to realize the need for its extending its reach nationally.

“As an industry, we're ready now. The time is right. We really have to come together,” Yeager said. “It was an honor to be asked to do this because we believe it’s an unprecedented opportunity to bring our industry together in a way that we haven’t maybe done to date.”

As of press time, at least 26 had joined Carequality, including: California Association of Health Information Exchanges, eClinicalWorks, Epic, Greenway, ICA, Kaiser Permanente, lifeIMAGE, MDI Achieve, Medfusion, Medicity, MedVirginia, Mirth, Netsmart, New York eHealth Collaborative, Optum HIE, Orion Health, Santa Cruz Health Information Exchange, Surescripts and Walgreens.

And Healtheway rattled off a list of other interested parties some of which may have joined after this article was published.

Government Health IT senior editor Diana Manos contributed to this report.