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HEALTH INFORMATION EXCHANGE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES.

Abstract.

Health Information Exchange is rapidly growing in the health care industry, and this is due to the extensive use of Information Communication Technology and wide invention of a whole lot of Information Technology devices and applications almost each day that comes. Advanced Health care systems and health service providers have immensely implemented the element of Health Information Exchange and hence promoting it worldwide. Subsequently, the impact of the implementation of Health Information Exchange in the health care system has been greatly revealed. Several challenges, predicaments and confusion can be eliminated in the field of health care if the right details about the right patients are provided at the right time, and this is what health information exchange does. This paper aims at reviewing the benefits, methods and challenges of health information exchange.

Introduction

How would patients’ data be handled in the health care industry if the system of health information exchange did not evolve? How hectic would it be to access patients’ information in an analog setting? This is what the system of Health Information Exchange deals with. Health Information Exchange is a system that enables health service provider to easily access and safely share patients’ important medical information electronically and very fast. Health Information exchange is currently in three forms namely. Query based exchange, consumer mediated exchange and directed exchange. Query based exchange is the ability of health care providers to ask for health information about a patient from other fellow health care providers. This is often used during unplanned health care. Consumer mediated exchange is the ability of patients to control the use of their health information among health care providers. Directed exchange is the ability to share health information between health care providers electronically to enhance coordinated health care.

a % Cumulative variance explained using principal component analysis. b Scree plot graph for components with its eigen values of lowland region

BENEFITS.

Numerous benefits of employing health information exchange have been discovered and some of these are. • • Enables health service providers to explore technologies which improve patient medical care. • Enables easy access to patient medical information by health care providers for diagnosis. • Enables health care providers to operate more efficiently by reducing use of paperwork • Promotes good network between health care departments and patients. • Equips health care providers with an extensive view about their patients and promoting effective health care provision. • Promotes education to patients by engaging them in their own health care. • Promotes public health reporting which can help in situations that require monitoring and contact tracing. • Enables health service providers to easily get feedback from their patients about their health. • Improves patients’ satisfaction and health care provider experience in health care provision. • Improves patients monitoring and disease management hence promoting effective health care provision. • Provides access to valuable clinic data. • Improves health care quality, safety and patients’ recovery.

CHALLENGES

Just as there are quite several benefits of health information exchange, • A lot of expenses are incurred during the transition process from analog record system to digital record system. • Requires too much training and some medical professions may fail to adapt to it. • Patients and health care providers may fail to follow the Terms and conditions of data management and security. • Some patients may refuse to freely give out their information with fear that it will leak. • Costs associated with the process of transitioning from an analog document management system to a digital document management system • Privacy and security concerns, as digital formats are vulnerable to cyberattacks and account compromise • Comply with state and federal data management and security regulations, which can sometimes be conflicting or unclear • Patients withhold information as some may be reluctant to share their private medical history on digital platforms • Sharing of information between states, as different confidentiality rules can make it difficult to comply with patient medical history sharing across the country • Communication issues between facilities that may not keep the same type of records or have incomplete records • Competition from other medical institutions • Training issues and user error, some healthcare professionals may have difficulty accepting the new digital format • Find the right IT support to navigate and maintain the new digital format

CONCLUSION

As more and more healthcare information is digitized, the potential for HIE to improve patient safety will increase and is already strong. A challenge will be to develop health systems capable of processing and using the greatly increased information Only then will the potential for improved patient safety through improved HIE be realized, as we have increased the percentage of time the right information is delivered to the right person at the right time so that the right health care decisions can be made.

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Information Links: connecting public health with health information exchanges [news release]. Princeton, NJ: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; February 27, 2006.

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