Health information exchange is a concept that came into existence after the realization that there is high mobility of people. A person working in another state or area can have serious health problems or emergencies. It is important for the new doctor handling your case to have information about you. The doctor needs information about your prior treatment or chronic diseases, what allergies do you have and the current drugs the patient is currently using. Despite the fact that such information could have been stored very well in electronic formats in your primary health care, the new doctor much have a mechanism of access that information in order to provide precise treatment. The problem becomes more complex when the patient has his/her data stored in more than one health facility. There was a need to ensure that information is exchanged from one health facility to another. Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the solution to this problem. But what are some of the challenges and pitfalls that this technology faces. This paper will look at some of the challenges and pitfalls that HIE faces.
According to National Alliance for Health Information Technology, HIE is defined as the technology that enables sharing of patient records such as lab results, medication list among different health facilities in electronic form. This means that there will be interconnection between health organizations, physicians and pharmacies within a given region. This is because patients mostly visit health facilities within their region where they live. HIE was aim at ensuring that medical prescription error is minimized. The electronic exchange of patient data is aimed at improving the quality of healthcare services. Apart from the positive outcome of this practice there are challenges that HIE process faces each day.
The first challenge is privacy and security concerns. The information transferred between doctors, physicians and other health practitioners is very sensitive because it concerns the health of an individual. There must be reliable and secure transfer if information among the health facilities. HIE is an important part of the health information technology which facilitates the transfer of medical records among government agencies and health information organizations. The national standards must be adhered to. This is a challenge in enforcing standards of transferring information from one doctor to the other. Inconsistencies in the policies and the laws is another pitfall of the HIE process. There is no consistency among the laws and policies of different regions, states and hospitals. The health providers may have issues accessing information from another hospital because of their policies. The problem of too much information also is critical when it comes to medical malpractice suits by the patients. There is fear among medical practitioners that they will face legal suit by patients because they may not be able to go through all the information of the patients in the process of making decisions. This means that patients may have a lot of records stored by different faculties when the doctor makes decisions with only particular records it become risky. The law and policies about medical decisions based on important facts is not clear and consistent.
Complete and accurate information is an assumption that is made while designing the HIE. However, in medical field information must be accurate and complete in order to make decisions. There is no mechanism of ensuring that the information provided is accurate and complete. The other aspect is who will be responsible for the incomplete and inaccurate patient records. HIE can also be expensive to implement. Having a secure and reliable connectivity between several facilities is very expensive to implement. The cost of the technology, training and maintaining the systems is very high. The small practices cannot afford Health Information Exchange.
There is a question of disrupting the normal business process once HIE is implemented. This means that there are going to be many changes in the way things used to work in a health facility. This is because there are standards that must be followed in coming up with patient records that can be transferred to other health facilities, physicians or pharmacies. The current workflow will be disrupted.
Another key concern is the return on investment (RIO) in the monetary terms. The key concern here is if the patient medical records will actually help medical practitioners to make accurate decisions. The assumption and the main purpose of HIE implementation is that it will benefit the customers by ensuring that they will get better services. However, the long term benefits have not been considered in this case. Another pitfall of HIE is that it leaves out the role of personal health record (PHR). This is the health information technologies that physicians install on their computers. HIE does not interact with such records in the process of exchanging information. PRH are very critical in ensuring that there is accurate information about the patient. HIE technology also suffers another great challenge in its implementation process. This is because there is no widespread adoption of these systems. This means that there are health facilities that have not yet implemented the HIE technology. Therefore, there is not sharing of patient records from such facilities.
Works Cited
Buntin, Melinda Beeuwkes, et al. "The benefits of health information technology: a review of the recent literature shows predominantly positive results." Health Affairs 30.3 (2011): 464-471.
Lee, Renée Gravois, and Theresa Garvin. "Moving from information< i> transfer</i> to information< i> exchange</i> in health and health care." Social science & medicine 56.3 (2003): 449-464.
Marchibroda, Janet M. "The impact of health information technology on collaborative chronic care management." Journal of managed care pharmacy: JMCP 14.2 Suppl (2008): S3-11.
Vest, Joshua R., and Larry D. Gamm. "Health information exchange: persistent challenges and new strategies." Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 17.3 (2010): 288-294.
