Health Information Infrastructure (HII): A Community Level Conformatics

Health information infrastructure (HII) is a community level informatics systems comprising thorough electronic patient records for the whole population and can be obtained from authorized personnel anywhere when necessary. The key requirements for a successful HII are privacy and trust, stakeholder cooperation, information always available in an electronic format, financial sustainability, community focus, and governance and organizational support. Moreover, HII can be viewed either from an institution or a patient standpoint (Yasnoff, 2014). Privacy and trust are pivotal between patients and health care professionals/organizations. Without its existence, patients will not get the optimal care that they need because they will not divulge

Yansoff (2014) states, “Advocates argue that patient control, in addition to being an effective approach to privacy, could also serve to ensure ongoing, consistent health care stakeholder participation. Of course, in order for this approach to be practical, the rights of patients to electronic copies of their records under HIPAA would need to be enforced”. In addition, patient’s information must be in an electronic format to comply with inter-collaboration amongst physicians. However, not every physician employs an EHR because it is not beneficial to them. It is the other stakeholders who reap the benefits. Implementing an EHR is extremely expensive and most times it is the physician who bears the brunt of the expenses and not receive the rewards. “It is unreasonable to expect physicians to shoulder 100% of the cost of systems while accruing only 11% of the benefits” (Yasnoff, 2014). Furthermore, initial reimbursements from HITECH for implementing an EHR is much appreciated; however, it does not cover the life of the physician’s practice in business. It takes money to continuously update an EHR as technology improves over time. Reimbursements are only an initial

If patients trust their physician/organization will manage and secure their information, then an institution-centric method is used. However, if it is the patient who controls information and access to his or her record from multiple health care facilities, then a patient-centric method is used (Yasnoff,