Why do providers and patients support HIE?
The latest stage 3 meaningful use proposal highlighted the importance of health information exchange within the health care industry. Enhancing HIE strategies will have benefits that include increased access to essential medical data. This is why so many providers and patients support HIE as a means to improve patient care quality.
What are the benefits of HIEs?
According to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, HIE better enables physicians to track and manage patient health records while reducing medical errors and increasing patient safety. Providers have also found that HIE eliminates a lot of the documentation and data entry that was once a part of the office workflow, enhancing health care efficiency.
As so many practices have adopted electronic health records to improve their patient outcomes and care quality, it is important to focus on HIE to ensure interoperability among EHR systems within hospitals and individual practices.
A recent newsletter issued by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis reported on a research paper published in the journal of Health Affairs. After analyzing 27 studies on the benefits of HIEs, the researchers found that HIE systems may be lowering costs for physicians and hospitals, but the main advantage is the medical benefits.
Patients believe HIE is necessary
Providers are not the only ones looking for systems that enhance HIE. A survey by ORC International and released by the Society of Participatory Medicine found that 75 percent of polled Americans feel that it is important that their health information can easily be shared between their doctors, hospitals and any additional health care providers.
The survey also showed that 87 percent of the respondents are against any possibilities of being billed for the exchange of vital health data among health care professionals. However, it is possible that after implementing EHR systems and other health IT to transmit health data, practices could get charged every time they send and receive information to other providers.
A total of 20 percent of polled Americans also reported that either they or a family member have experienced a problem in the past because their health records could not be accessed by a different health care professional. Delays in receiving patient data is another obstacle that both physicians and providers have had to face.
Regardless of whether HIE improves quality of care or leads to benefits like lower costs, it is clear that both physicians and patients think it is a necessity. Therefore, the adoption of health IT that makes data easily sharable is crucial.
