23 Jan Understanding Health Information Exchanges: the Role of HIEs in Modern Healthcare
Over the course of the past decade, a surge toward modernizing and improving patient care has come to mean the creation of electronic medical records and health information exchanges. These enable healthcare providers to efficiently access and share patient medical information, collaborate better with multiple providers, and avoid errors and duplicate care. Healthcare information exchange technology is an expanding industry, and workers who are adept at HIE systems have their pick of desirable jobs.
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Benefits of a Health Information Exchange
Perhaps the easiest way to understand all the myriad benefits of HIEs is to group them by who is receiving the benefit.
Benefits to Patients
- Helps improve quality and safety of patient care by reducing medication and medical errors
- Access to health information when doctors’ offices are closed or when patient is traveling
- Enables patients to get prescriptions and lab results electronically
- Eliminates redundant or unnecessary testing
- Lowers some healthcare costs
- Encourages patients to educate themselves and take on a more proactive role in their own healthcare
- Enables emerging technology and other medical services to reach patients faster
Benefits to Doctors
- Reduces paperwork, allowing doctors to spend more time with patients
- Creates access to better clinical decision support tools so treatment is more effective
Benefits to the American Public
- Improves public health reporting and monitoring
- Opens the door between cutting edge research and actual medical practice
- Creates baseline of technical infrastructure for state and national levels
- Establishes a standard of use between different electronic health records kept by different doctors and healthcare offices or organizations
Challenges to Healthcare Information Exchanges
Healthcare information exchange technology is an evolving field, and as such faces certain growth challenges. As hospitals buy other hospitals and private doctor practices, records assimilation can take time. Some hospitals complain that current HIE software products are difficult to use in conjunction with old records and old technology. Some HIE providers are better than others. And sometimes, it’s only when an HIE provider reaches a certain volume of records that it becomes effective.
Even when records are seamlessly integrated, healthcare providers experience no technical or scale glitches, and users of the HIE products are fully trained, patient opt-in is crucial to the success of any exchange. Without a patient’s consent to participate, even the best HIE is useless. Educating patients about the benefits of HIEs is essential.
HIE Vendors
There is a wide range of HIE providers starting with state-run vendors and including large and small private companies. The best providers perform highly in the following areas:
- Accountable care support
- Sustainability
- Interoperability
- Analytics
- Accessibility
- Configuration
- Interfaces and implementations
- Clinical workflow
- Data integrity
- Security
Black Book Rankings, a research firm that provides comparison data about top tech vendors to HIT users, investors and the media, runs an annual poll among HIE users to determine the top performing providers. According to the most recent poll, the top five national HIE providers are:
- Covisint
- Cerner
- Allscripts dbMotion
- INFOR
- Informatics Corporation of America
Careers in Health Information Exchange Technology
A growing industry such as HIE tech offers a wide variety of healthcare IT career options. From data entry to chief executive officer of IT, there are many opportunities for skilled and talented workers. If you are just starting out in this field or if you have been honing your tech skills for years, there is no better time to be looking for a job.
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