Health Information Exchange (HIE) mobilizes health information electronically between organizations within a region, community, or hospital system. The participants in the data exchange are named in the aggregated health information networks. HIE provides the ability to move clinical information between different health information systems electronically. The goal of the HIE is to facilitate access to and reprocess clinical data to provide safer, more timely, effective, efficient, and equitable patient-centered care that can also be useful to public health authorities in analyzing population health. HIE systems facilitate the efforts of physicists and clinicians to maintain high standards of patient care by electronically participating in continuous patient care with multiple.
The HIE system is crucial for the exchange of information in modern medical organizations. This is also confirmed by the case at Memorial Hospital of Manchester. The Memorial Hospital of Manchester case involved unsuccessful information exchange due to the traditional methods used by the staff. Paper documents may be inconvenient in handling patients and lead to severe issues (Oaches, 2016). The hospital cannot monitor the patient’s condition and their presence at the next appointment.
Moreover, if a patient has been transferred from another hospital, searching for a medical history can take long, leading to additional procedures and misdiagnosis. Another problem is that paper documents can be lost or confused, then the patient may not receive the necessary medications. HIE not only allows quick access to information but also has a number of advantages, such as efficiency and availability (Zhuang et al., 2020). Thus, many medical organizations are now implementing the HIE system, despite converting paper documents into electronic format.
HIE can provide clinical information such as test results, current medications, allergies, and other clinical information crucial to a patient’s treatment. Other demographic information used to identify a person, such as a name, date of birth, and address, can also be transferred (Lenert & McSwain, 2020). The exchange of such information will help to quickly transfer information about the patient from hospital to hospital, as well as to immediately prescribe the necessary treatment without undergoing repeated medical examinations. Also, in case of emergency, this information will help find the patient’s relatives to report his condition.
However, there is information that organizations should not share. This includes, for example, the patient’s psychological diagnoses, if any. Psychological diagnosis should not figure in the exchange of information about the patient’s condition since this is strictly confidential information and can only be communicated by the patient themselves or upon request from higher authorities. Also, the patient’s medical data should not contain information about the diseases of their relatives. Although the exchange of such information would allow for a faster diagnosis in some cases, the transmission of such information is also strictly confidential.
HIE Model
Some models and exchanges may be appropriate for the organization in the case study. Model types considered a few types: centralized, decentralized / federated, hybrid. The hybrid model is the most successful option for implementing an information exchange system due to its cost and interface. Categories of health information state that patients are less willing to share their personal and confidential information (Esmaeilzadeh & Sambasivan, 2017). That is why a hybrid system is suitable for implementation, as it protects patient personal data, demographic data, as well as medical history.
Since the hybrid model is a combination of a centralized and a decentralized model, it ensures that HIE can track patient data over the network and makes it easier to transfer this data to the EHR of providers. Moreover, the advantage is that patients themselves will be able to view their data through a portal attached to the HIE (Menachemi et al., 2018). The system can also fit within the budget as it is relatively expensive but effective, which will reduce costs in the long run.
Such systems have both a centralized data storage and a record retrieval service necessary to obtain patient information. Data extraction methods using the hybrid model that will be included in the system include the following: automatic recognition technologies such as intelligent document recognition technologies (Blais et al.). Moreover, it has corporate master patient indexes and identity management (EMPI), cloud technologies, and applications like web portals.
All system components need to be implemented to analyze and use data in the HIE network to improve patient outcomes. Thus, the hybrid model can collect data from each institution that belongs to this model. Further, on the web portal, this data will be recognized, and the documents will be assigned an individual index related to the individual patient. Thus, the use of such a system will help avoid duplication of patient data, as well as provide access to medical workers to the requested information through cloud storage. The hybrid system described above will significantly simplify the exchange of data and help doctors save search time by directing it to the treatment of the patient. As a result, in hospitals, the overall percentage of patients’ health will increase, which will improve the statistics of all health care.
References
Blais, A. F., Borut, C., Alwan, C., Casey, N., Bramble, R., & Code, S. (n.d.). Health information exchange (hie): A primer and provider selection guide. Leading Change.
Esmaeilzadeh, P., Sambasivan, M. (2017). Patients’ support for health information exchange: A literature review and classification of critical factors. BMcriticaled Inform Decis Mak, 17(33). Web.
Lenert, L., & McSwain, B. Y. (2020). Balancing health privacy, health information exchange, and research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 27(6), 963–966.
Menachemi, N., Rahurkar, S., Harle, C. A., Vest, J. R. (Sept 2018). The benefits of health information exchange: An updated systematic review, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 25(9), 1259–1265.
Oaches, P. K. (2016). Health information management: Concepts, principles, and practice (5th ed.). Chicago, IL: American Health Information Management Association.
Zhuang, Y., Sheets, L. R., Chen, Y. W., Shae, Z. Y., Tsai, J. J., & Shyu, C. R. (2020). A patient-centric health information exchange framework using blockchain technology. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 24(8), 2169–2176. Web.