Improving Diagnosis Through Regional Health Information Organizations

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In modern fast pace healthcare delivery environment, a provider 's ability to diagnose and suggest treatment swiftly can make the difference in whether a patient would have optimistic or pessimistic ending. The consequences of a health provider 's decision and action can be traced to inaccurate or partial information from the patient or relatives. According to Grinten (2006), medical errors are often the consequence of healthcare providers not having full medical record for the patients they treat, especially in an emergency situation. For this reason and other health related challenges, many healthcare organizations considered it imperative to form regional health information organizations (RHIOs) to enable them exchange and use health information …show more content…

RHIOs which consist of hospitals, physicians, health plans, laboratories, consumers, and other relevant stakeholders seem to provide governance body and policies for facilitating health information exchange among participants and the technical infrastructure for automated exchange. The surge toward technological advancement and internet usage has made the establishment of national health information network (NHIN) an important source for sharing health information across the nation, which RHIOs are considered as integral part for its success. This paper will focus on pros and cons of RHIOs to achieving NHIN 's goals as well as major challenges confronting RHIOs ' long-term achievements in viability, broad participation, and financial …show more content…

Additionally, the use of RHIOs can make it very difficult for national health information network to identify errors in the health information and the processes used by the healthcare organizations in different areas, if RHIOs are employed to achieve conformity ambitions. Another con is that, as a strategy to address patients privacy and security concerns, health information organizations were established to allow secure and integrated sharing of health information among various stakeholders, not excluding clinical partners and public health (Shapiro, Mostashari, Hripcsak, Soulakis, & Kuperman, 2011). However, RHIOs are still struggling with security, data storage, technical support, and master patient index issues and these conditions can limit the effectiveness of the exchange in future, if they are used for achieving NHIN 's

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