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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.
We’re excited to welcome Anand Shroff, vice president of product management at OptumInsight, to Healthcare-Exchange. A strong advocate for advancing the use of technology in healthcare, Anand discusses the role cloud computing may play in the industry’s future.
It’s no secret that healthcare has historically been slow to adopt the latest and greatest in technology and even slower to embrace technological paradigm shifts, as evidenced by the continued presence of client-server computing in healthcare in the age of the Internet. While strides to catch up have been made in recent years – with shifts toward electronic health records (EHR), advanced health information exchange (HIE), and mobile computing devices – the world of business is changing rapidly, and the industry needs to do a better job of keeping pace.
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:
The rise of various accountable or collaborative care models across the country is already driving new demand for the right technologies to support them. These technologies are especially critical for those aiming to achieve Sustainable Health Communities, where all parties are connected, intelligent and aligned. While hospitals and health networks are already familiar with electronic medical records (EMRs) and health information exchanges (HIEs), they will need to become comfortable with a group of new solutions — some that the payer community has relied on for years and others that will put the data from EMRs and HIEs to the test.
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.
As a senior director at HIMSS supporting the Health Information Exchange initiatives and involved with a number of RHIO and HIE efforts across the country, even I learned something from last week’s panel discussion, HIE Reality Check: The Path to a Nationwide HIE, available for download here. Dr. Michael Westcott, Phil Reilly, Keith Hepp and Deb Bass tackled a number of key issues and challenges facing HIE implementation today – from driving clinician and community support to overcoming operational challenges as well as securing both funding and sustainability. The panelists discussed their experiences and perspectives of long and short term activities needed to drive nationwide HIE. Some of the key discussion points included:
- Avoiding turning paper islands into electric islands;
- Overcoming the reluctance of small physician practices;
- Maintaining HIE and RHIO funding beyond grants; and
- Effectively communicating the benefits of effective data exchange to patients.
Please feel free to listen in and share your own experiences and feedback below!
– Pam Matthews, RN, MBA, CPHIMS, FHIMSS
Pam Matthews, RN, MBA, CPHIMS, FHIMSS
Pam Matthews, RN, MBA, CPHIMS, FHIMSS, serves as the Senior Director of Regional Affairs at HIMSS, a cause-based, not-for-profit organization exclusively focused on providing global leadership for the optimal use of information technology (IT) and management systems for the betterment of healthcare. We are pleased to introduce her as this week’s guest blogger on Healthcare-Exchange.
We can all agree that great strides are taking place today to enable Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), as evidenced by the great work being done across the country at both the state and regional levels. For example, projects in Northern Virginia and Nebraska have taken off and are already providing real value to all participating constituencies.
I don’t know about you, but I was thrilled to hear about today’s launch of MEDS-ED Link, a project of the Northern Virginia Regional Health Information Organization (NoVaRHIO) in conjunction with Inova Health System and GE Healthcare.
Health care leaders and policy makers should be commended for making several smart moves in this week’s delivery of the final rule for the meaningful use (MU) criteria, but one of the most critical is the committee’s decision to include the emergency department (ED) as a viable place of service.
For the past several months, several of my colleagues and I have been part of the ongoing effort, working directly with legislators and other industry leaders to ensure that the ED “gets its due” in the MU final rule. One of the most cost and care intensive areas of every health system, but neglected in the initial rounds of MU criteria, the ED is where the flow of patient care most often begins and consistently feeds patients throughout the rest of the hospital – and I’m thrilled that policy makers have now shown that they agree.
