CommonWell Health Alliance Announces New Executive Director

CommonWell Health Alliance (@CommonWell) announced Paul L. Wilder as its new Executive Director. Paul takes the helm of CommonWell as it enters a new chapter in its pursuit of empowering clinicians, practitioners and individuals with interoperability services via its robust, nationwide network.

“Paul has been involved in health IT since before interoperability became a national priority,” said Scott Schneider, chairman of the CommonWell Health Alliance Board of Directors. “His experience gives him a broad range of skills that will be instrumental in moving CommonWell forward at a critical time in our journey.”

With more than two decades of health IT experience, Wilder has held various roles focusing on imaging, clinical informatics and interoperability. Most recently, he was Vice President of Strategy & Business Development for Philips Interoperability Solutions.

Wilder spent close to 10 years with one of the largest regional HIE networks in the country, the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC)—serving as its Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Product Management, and Program Director for NYeC’s Regional Extension Center. During his time with the NYeC, he helped nearly 10,000 primary care providers attest to Meaningful Use and solidified the state’s status as one of the national leaders in health IT adoption. These roles enabled him to work and hear directly from providers and end users of electronic health records (EHRs), which gives him an important perspective as a leader in health IT adoption and execution.

“As we continue on our journey to make interoperability ubiquitous by building our services into EHRs and health IT systems, Paul’s experience working with various key audiences—including the provider community—will be instrumental,” said Schneider. “His work with HIEs coupled with his broad range of knowledge across the care continuum and outside of health care, will enable him to bring a fresh, yet nuanced perspective to the interoperability challenges ahead of us.”

Prior to joining the NYeC, Paul spent more than a decade focused on health care information technologies at McKesson, Fujifilm Medical Systems and GE Healthcare. He received his Master of Business Administration from New York University with a concentration in Finance and Operations. Paul also holds two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania—one from the College of Arts and Sciences in Economics and the other from the School of Engineering and Applied Science in Biomedical Science.

“It was more by chance than plan that my career path, almost from the start, was focused on health IT; however, I quickly became both personally and professionally passionate about helping transform our health care delivery system and data access,” said Wilder. “In just six years, CommonWell has made huge progress in enabling nationwide interoperability, and I’m honored to lead the organization as it continues to make its mark in improving health and care outcomes.”

The CommonWell network has more than 66 million individuals enrolled, and services are live at more than 15,000 care provider sites nationwide. To date, more than 119 million health records have been retrieved.

Learn more about Paul

About CommonWell Health Alliance
CommonWell Health Alliance is a not-for-profit trade association of health care and technology organizations working together to create universal access to health data nationwide. CommonWell members represent more than 20 care settings, including market leaders and technology innovators in acute, ambulatory and post-acute care, patient portals, imaging, population health, emergency services and more. CommonWell and its members are committed to the belief that provider access to health data must be built into information technologies at a reasonable cost for use by a broad range of health care providers and the populations and people they serve.