You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘by Glenn Keet’ category.
In our last post of the HIE patient consent series, we described why attaining patient consent is necessary to the success of an HIE. But to the average patient — you know, the one who isn’t a hospital CIO in their downtime — the concept of an HIE can raise privacy concerns. To overcome this, healthcare organizations need to educate patients on how HIEs work, assure them that their information will remain confidential and secure, and explain to them the benefits of electronically sharing patient information via this exchange.
According to the American Medical Association and the Markle Foundation, four in five American consumers believe that using an online patient health record (PHR) would yield major benefits to them in managing their health care. In spite of this, the usage of PHRs has been very low to date, due in some part to patient concerns about privacy of their personal health information.
In this three-part series on Healthcare-Exchange, we’ll explore some of the issues around patient consent for HIEs and propose some tips to help organizations and providers collaborate to promote patient participation.
As healthcare organizations continue to implement HIEs, task forces are challenged with determining how to best attain the keystone of the operation: patient consent. For an HIE to be successful, patient data is critical, but it’s not as simple as just collecting it. Here are some things that healthcare organizations need to keep in mind in order to populate a successful HIE with the right data, while simultaneously maintaining patient privacy and ensuring patients’ comfort:
With financial, clinical and regulatory pressures increasing steadily, and the new and confounding acronyms appearing daily, many hospitals and health systems today are wondering where they should first put their focus — building a robust Health Information Exchange (HIE), or preparing for an Accountable Care Organization (ACO) or other payment reform model?
Each variety of HIE — statewide, regional or private/IDN — has different goals. Privately held HIEs are rooted in the desire to achieve clinical and operational excellence among physicians within a health system, while regional or statewide systems are focused on sharing patient information across providers in a geographic area. We all know that trying to connect these disparate systems can be challenging, and that linking into a larger network requires additional infrastructure investment. But rather than implementing a less robust system that will need to be replaced in two years, the inevitability of some kind of payment reform and shared risk model coming to a town near you means that health care organizations need to invest in an HIE that both enables meaningful use now and has the power to support collaborative care models later.
