Essay On Health Information Exchange

An electronic health information exchange is the sharing of health related information between patients, providers, nursing staff, pharmacists and other health care organizations. The main objective of an electronic health information exchange (HIE) is for patients’ personal health information to be available, accessible, and sharable at any time and to follow them from physician to physician, increasing interoperability while decreasing cost and time. There are many benefits to an organization implementing a health information exchange; an HIE can decrease unnecessary services and reduce costs by making administrative duties more efficient. It also allows patients to get more involved with their own health care and encourages a better quality of care. The health information exchange improves the quality of care in healthcare organizations. One area of concern when being a part of the health information exchange is technical issues that could occur in the system. Getting patient information to successfully transfer from provider to provider, state agencies included, is a challenge that health information organizations can face. “Although these organizations have proven the ability to receive information, they have realized that a lack of consensus in terms of standards prevents them from pushing data effectively and economically.”(Milstine, 2011 p.761) This issue has the potential to be a problem for health information managers because HIM professionals must follow all laws and standards for protecting patient personal health information.
Summary of literature
The privacy and security of the health information exchange can be further improved by monitoring access to the electronic records, increasing physician knowledge and awar...

... middle of paper ...

...ecure, and the privacy rule insures that. The health information exchange does much more than share patient data. It provides better opportunity to increase quality of care; it saves money related to healthcare costs for hospital organizations in many ways, and increases efficiency by minimizing all the unnecessary paperwork. The HIE is a great way for patients to stay connected with their primary care providers and is a much easier way for patients to stay engaged in their own health care. Patients have the opportunity to share their health information through the exchange, which provides for improvement in public health and monitoring. The health information exchange is constantly developing and growing all over the United States. According to the above studies and results, the health information exchange improves the quality of care in healthcare organizations.