Magruder Hospital is the latest provider to sign on with CommonWell Health Alliance, a step that will give its clinicians the ability to see patient data from other health organizations within its Cerner EHR.

Doctors and nurses at Magruder – a 25-bed critical access hospital with 30 active and 120 courtesy staff physicians – will be able to access medical records from outside providers that participate in CommonWell, officials say.

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"Magruder Hospital is helping lead the charge for interoperability across healthcare," said Bob Robke, vice president of network services at Cerner, a founding member of the vendor-led group, in a press statement. "Our organizations share a common belief that every person's medical record should follow them, regardless of where they receive medical treatment or the type of EHR system that houses their records."

CommonWell services include patient identification and linking, to help more quickly and accurately identify patients as they move among different care settings; record locator and retrieval, to help providers access patient records, irrespective of where care was delivered; patient access, privacy and consent management; and authentication and auditing services to facilitate secure data sharing among member systems.

"Signing up to use CommonWell services was an easy decision for us, since their approach to interoperability will help us connect to important patient information that happens outside of the hospital walls," said Chuck Dellick, director of information technology at Magruder Hospital, in a statement.

[See also: CommonWell wants to 'open this up']

This past week, CommonWell also announced its first executive director: Jitin Asnaani most recently worked athenahealth, where he led its technology standards and policy program. He has also served as standards and interoperability framework coordinator at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, and has served on the interoperability workgroups of the National HIT Policy and Standards Committees.

"Jitin has been instrumental in the CommonWell Health Alliance since its founding," said Rod O'Reilly, president of McKesson Health Solutions, in a press statement. "(H)is strategic mindset and his ability to execute while collaborating with a wide array of stakeholders makes him the perfect executive director for the Alliance at this critical juncture."