According to a report from SearchHealthIT’s Don Fluckinger, two of the biggest health IT vendors in the industry Cerner Corp. (Kansas City) and McKesson (San Francisco) are in talks to form an alliance that would make their EHR patient data interoperable. SearchHealthIT cites unnamed sources and says that the announcement could come as soon as the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2013 annual conference, held March 3-7 this year in New Orleans.

The report says the deal between Cerner and McKesson would position the two companies against fellow EHR vendor Epic (Verona, Wisc.). The deal would be a big step in overcoming one of the major challenges of health information exchange. As written about in the December issue of Healthcare Informatics, multiple, disparate electronic health record (EHR) systems involved in most hospital-physician communications remains a stumbling block to easily facilitated sharing of key clinical information at the point of care or use.

A spokesperson for Cerner had no comment on the possible deal, while representatives from McKesson did not return HCI’s emails.