Health Information Exchanges (HIE) continue to grow across the US Healthcare landscape. The origins of HIEs go back nearly three decades. But one problem has plagued HIEs since the beginning. That is the challenge of keeping your HIE data up-to-date.
As with most complex healthcare solutions, there are numerous barriers to keeping your HIE data up-to-date. These include political challenges, patient privacy concerns, competitive pressures among healthcare IDNs and inconsistent and changing data standards. Therefore, we need a fresh idea for this age-old problem.
In a paper published in 2010, the National Center for Biotechnology identified several factors that drive the need for HIEs. These factors still remain today:
Numerous factors in our society underscore the need for changes to this state of isolated, fragmented health information. We are a mobile population requiring access to vital information in different locations. For example, many retired Americans receive treatment in very different locations seasonally, and increasingly prevalent chronic conditions, like diabetes, can only be managed by information-based care management. Many obvious patient safety and quality issues arise in the hand-off of patients among providers that fail to share necessary information. Natural disasters displace individuals to locales with unfamiliar providers and can destroy or render inaccessible existing health information repositories. The growing use of pharmaceuticals and associated recalls of drugs from the market may call for immediate identification of affected individuals. Finally, the likelihood of serious pandemics calls for rapid identification of ill persons and accurate immunization histories. (Link to article)
A solution for HIE data
ISeeYouCare’s Personal Health Record platform is the perfect solution for feeding data to HIEs. It solves the problem of keeping your HIE Data up-to-to-date by constantly feeding information from the patient’s EHR platforms into a consolidated personal health record. The PHR, in turn, can feed up-to-date information to the HIE. Consequently, this resolves the issues of patient duplication. Duplication and redundancy is removed upon consuming the data from the EHR. Additionally, this removes complexities from the system by integrating at this level as well.
If you would like to learn more, contact us about our Personal Health Record and its ability to feed data to your HIE.