Question

In: Economics

I had not previously heard of health information exchange (HIE) before reading "Despite the Spread of...

I had not previously heard of health information exchange (HIE) before reading "Despite the Spread of Health Information Exchange, there is Little Evidence of its Impact on Cost, Use, and Quality of Care" by Rahurkar, Vest, and Menachemi. I did find the concept of electronically transferring information to be quite simple in practice and immensely helpful in theory. Though I thought it was quite interesting that "about two-thirds of hospitals and almost half of physician practices" use HIE, I feel as though every hospital or doctors visit comes with the same forms to fill out of family history, personal history, etc. that would be beneficial to be included in the health information exchange (2015). Overall, with 57.5 percent of analyses finding a beneficial effect of HIE and 31.9 percent of analyses finding no significant effect I think it should be encouraged for more hospitals and physician practices to use HIE. With the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009 providing financial incentives to those who use HIE, it may be an effect as to why we aren't seeing more beneficial effects of HIE. I would assume that the more providers who use HIE the more often boosts in efficiency, reductions in health care costs, and improvements in outcomes would be seen. So, perhaps should be done to get greater participation from providers.

It also seemed that specific ways of studying the effectiveness of HIE on an outcome may have had an effect on the results of the study. Perhaps a more uniform approach to determining this relationship could bring about a better understanding of if and how HIE can have a beneficial effect on the outcome being studied. As the article states this could reduce the presence of selection bias and confounding variables. How else could the use of HIE be improved upon to cause greater benefits to our healthcare system? Could it be beneficial for more information to be included in HIE?

Solutions

Expert Solution

In Health information exchange (HIE), Doctors and other healthcare providers electronically store patient's medical information and can share this electronically. With the use of HIE, health care providers can reduce their time in maintaining every single record of patients on papers, that is very time consuming.

What are some of the benefits of HIE?

  • Helps in preventing errors as the patient's information is shared from one doctor to another which ensures that everyone is involved in patient's safety and care.
  • Reduce costs.
  • Reduce unnecessary testing.
  • Saves time as maintaining records on paper requires more time than keeping electronically.
  • Reduces medical errors.

How can the use of HIE be improved to provide a better healthcare system?

  • There should be an effort in strengthening patient's care and safety not only in urban areas but also in the rural and underserved areas.
  • Use of HIE for the Patients who have witnessed any natural disaster so that they can also be benefitted.
  • Improvement in HIE, at the time of public health crisis. Because at this time there can be an urgent need for the information of a patient who has any medical history.
  • It should be ensured that the patient's information should be kept with utmost privacy.
  • Patient's consent is very important and should not be ignored before sharing his/her information through HIE. (To avoid any problems and misunderstandings in future).

Is it important or beneficial to include additional information (other than patient's information) to be included in HIE?

Additional information can include Patient's family history, data or the history or data of the patient's close relatives.

As family members share genes, physical traits and characteristics, it can be considered very important in gathering their information too. This can help in these ways:-

  • Genetic diseases which include diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer can all be transmitted from the parents or close relatives to patients. Therefore information regarding this should be collected.
  • Disease which might occur at an earlier age than expected.
  • If any of the family members have one of the above genetic diseases, there can be chances of transmitting these from the family members to the patient. So the records of family members can be considered important. According to me, additional information can be considered beneficial to be included in HIE.

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