For most people in America, this week is all about ensuring you filed your taxes on time and figuring out what you are going to spend your return on, if you were lucky enough to have one. But for 
those of us working in health IT, this year, it is also about being in Chicago participating in HIMSS15.
We at CommonWell Health Alliance love this time of year. It is where we first announced our formation two years ago, and it is where we continue to celebrate the progress we and our members have accomplished in helping to break down barriers and solve nationwide interoperability.
This year, we kicked off that celebration with our 2015 Annual General Meeting on Sunday evening. Our newly announced Executive Director Jitin Asnaani shared his insights over the past year with the attending membership, which now is 25 companies strong and growing fast. He highlighted that those in this room helped represent 70% of the acute EHR market and nearly 25% of the ambulatory EHR market, as well as market leaders across the care continuum. He shared the exciting progress our members were making in offering CommonWell services across the country, with more than 60 provider sites now live and more than 5,000 forecasted to be live by the end of the year. And he gave a preview to extending those live sites from just hospital and clinics to additional care settings like lab, pharmacy, imaging and post-acute.
Building on the great update to membership on Sunday, Monday morning allowed us to share that excitement with the more than 40,000 HIMSS attendees crowding the exhibit floor.
At our booth (#3960) members shared demonstrations of their collective experience with CommonWell services. CommonWell representatives from athena, Cerner, CPSI, Greenway and McKesson provided a real-world example of their sharing data across the different systems.
Members also participated in an open forum roundtable led by Executive Director Jitin Asnaani and the day ended with a FHIRside chat and demo with Dr. David McCallie, Arien Malec and many more CommonWell members.
But don’t worry if you missed those yesterday. We are hosting a new series of demonstrations and presentations today and Wednesday, so please stop by Booth 3960 in the South Building. You can find a full schedule of our HIMSS events at commonwellprod.wpengine.com/himss15/.
For those of you not able to join us at HIMSS this year, you can watch a great interview with Jitin by Modern Healthcare: How CommonWell is trying to solve healthcare’s interoperability problem which was filmed onsite yesterday.