CommonWell Health Alliance Announces CVS Caremark as New Member

Nation's leading integrated pharmacy health care provider will help support and advance the Alliance's interoperability initiatives

News provided by

CommonWell Health Alliance

Feb 24, 2014, 08:45 ET

ORLANDO, Fla., Feb. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- CommonWell Health Alliance (the "Alliance") – the health information technology (HIT) vendor-led interoperability effort – announced today that CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS) has joined as one of the newest Contributing Members of the organization. CVS Caremark, the largest integrated pharmacy health care provider in the U.S., joins founding members Allscripts, athenahealth, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway, McKesson and Sunquest and service provider RelayHealth in the Alliance's work.

As the Alliance grows over time, participation by organizations such as CVS Caremark will help providers easily and securely access prescription information, enabling a more holistic view of the patient, with the goal of providing better care and increased patient and consumer safety. Through the Alliance, pharmacies and health care providers will be able to better connect with the broader health ecosystem.

"As pharmacies play an increasingly important role in the delivery of health care and pharmacists become more engaged in advising and counseling patients, there will be more opportunities to improve health outcomes through better data sharing across the provider community," said CVS Caremark Chief Medical Officer Troyen A. Brennan, M.D., M.P.H. "CommonWell will be well-positioned to help deliver real-time pharmacy-based information into physician practices to help identify opportunities to coordinate care and will help the pharmacist deliver care-based messages back to patients."

CVS Caremark will join CommonWell as a Contributing Member, building upon the foundation of the Alliance's structure and working with RelayHealth to embed these services natively into its pharmacy system.

"We are thrilled to have CVS Caremark join the CommonWell Health Alliance; they are a terrific complement to our existing membership and their decision to join is testament to the work we've accomplished over the past year," said Jeremy Delinsky, chairman of the board for the CommonWell Health Alliance and chief technology officer, athenahealth. "As an alliance, we look forward to working with CVS Caremark, recruiting and welcoming new members, and most importantly advancing the state of interoperability across health care."

If you are at HIMSS14, please join CommonWell Health Alliance at 12:30 pm ET today at CommonWell's booth #1389 as we welcome our new members and hear first-hand how they are planning to contribute to the universal interoperability mission.

The members of CommonWell Health Alliance invite health IT suppliers and others in support of our vision to join us in working together to provide trusted access to health information, in support of better, more cost-effective care for our patients and communities. Starting in July 2014, CommonWell will be offering two primary membership opportunities: Contributing and General Members. For more information on these membership levels, visit the CommonWell Health Alliance website or stop by CommonWell booth #1389 at HIMSS14.

About CommonWell Health Alliance
CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of health IT companies working together to create universal access to health care data. The Alliance is open to all health information technology providers who are committed to making patient's data available to themselves and providers regardless of where care occurs. Alliance members support the belief that provider access to this data must be built into health information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the populations and people they serve.

To learn more about the CommonWell Health Alliance, please visit www.commonwellalliance.org, and read CommonWell Community blog. Also follow CommonWell on Twitter at @CommonWell, join us on the Alliance's LinkedIn page, and like the Alliance's Facebook page.

About CVS Caremark
CVS Caremark is dedicated to helping people on their path to better health as the largest integrated pharmacy company in the United States. Through the company's more than 7,600 CVS/pharmacy stores; its leading pharmacy benefit manager serving more than 60 million plan members; and its retail health clinic system, the largest in the nation with more than 800 MinuteClinic locations, it is a market leader in mail order, retail and specialty pharmacy, retail clinics, and Medicare Part D Prescription Drug Plans. As a pharmacy innovation company with an unmatched breadth of capabilities, CVS Caremark continually strives to improve health and lower costs by developing new approaches such as its unique Pharmacy Advisor program that helps people with chronic diseases such as diabetes obtain and stay on their medications. Find more information about how CVS Caremark is reinventing pharmacy for better health at info.cvscaremark.com.

Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130724/DC51749LOGO

SOURCE CommonWell Health Alliance