Health Information Exchange (HIE) and Community Connectivity

Health information exchange (HIE) is a complex, multi-faceted issue that has dramatic implications for patient care, and which is fundamentally dependent upon IT. As physicians, hospitals teams, and other care providers struggle to keep up while trying to provide the best care possible, they face a difficult task coordinating care across multiple settings with a lack of shared information about patients. There are a number of obstacles to overcome:

• While patient care remains local, the information about patients is scattered across different providers within the community.
• Patient care is provided in a variety of settings across the community -- including hospitals, outpatient centers, long-term care centers, physician practices, and home care – each of which can have one or more existing systems.
• Protecting health information and empowering patients to participate is paramount.
• Simply transferring patient information from site to site is not enough to achieve “Meaningful Use” – the key to “Meaningful Use” is insuring that the information is integrated into physicians’ workflows as they make clinical decisions.
• As the government (both State and Federal) becomes more involved, it is difficult to understand and follow all the regulations, incentives, and demands for the sharing of information. 

Hospitals have long served a central role in connecting local health care communities and are now uniquely positioned to extend this role by leveraging and extending their current IT investments. It makes compelling business and clinical sense for hospitals to serve as the hub for HIE at the community level – which is the geography that matters most, since the vast majority of health care is delivered locally. And given PatientKeeper’s long history and proven success integrating with and connecting to various HIS systems, we are the ideal resource to partner with a community of care to make HIE a reality. 

PatientKeeper offers hospitals seeking to drive HIE a meaningful connectivity solution that addresses all the various challenges by:

• Connecting to information across the community in real-time, providing the latest, most complete patient health information available which physicians and patients need to make key clinical decisions about care.
• Integrating with current systems and/or providing access for those without systems today.
• Being secure and enabling patient consent models for sharing information.
• Integrating information into physicians’ workflow, including support for collaborating with other physicians in a patient’s circle of care.
• Supporting compliance with current and future government regulations. 
   

Learn More

Click here to download PatientKeeper’s HIE whitepaper, “Hospitals as the Drivers of HIE”.