Another EHR heavy-hitter has signed on to the CommonWell Health Alliance, joining several other health IT companies as new additions to the vendor-led interoperability organization and greatly expanding its market footprint.

[See also: A new hospital client for CommonWell]

Five new corporate members have joined CommonWell, it was announced today – most notably MEDITECH, perhaps the largest addition since Cerner, Allscripts, athenahealth, Greenway, McKesson and RelayHealth formed the alliance two years ago.

[See also: Epic trades jabs with CommonWell Health Alliance]

A 2014 KLAS report showed MEDITECH as one of the top three hospital EHR vendors by marketshare, along with Cerner and market leader Epic.

There's been little love lost between CommonWell and Epic, of course – especially recently, as a minor war of words erupted between the two camps, with each calling out the other's motives and commitment to interoperability.

CommonWell officials are touting MEDITECH's membership in the group, which they say now expands its share of the acute care EHR market from 50 percent to 70 percent.

Other new members announced today include Merge, whose imaging and other clinical technology will help CommonWell expand into new use cases in radiology and beyond. Kareo, meanwhile, which boasts some 60,000 users of its cloud-based medical office software, aims to help bolster CommonWell's ambulatory presence.

PointClickCare's cloud-based platform is deployed across senior living and skilled nursing facilities, and officials say Surgical Information Systems, or SIS, is the first member of CommonWell solely focused on developing tools specific to the perioperative process.

"We know it takes collective experience and dedication to break down barriers to nationwide data exchange, so we are especially pleased to welcome these industry innovators to the CommonWell family," said Nick Knowlton, CommonWell's membership committee chair, in a press statement.


"Each organization will contribute to our effort by providing a commitment to action and new perspectives for additional use cases that will help us accelerate our current deployment of real-world interoperability services," he added.