A Real-World HIE
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Some HIEs are already enabling data sharing to improve patient care
We recently walked through a detailed example of how all the different aspects of a health information exchange work together to improve the patient experience. We followed William Smith through some cardiac tests and ensured that his results promptly got to the right person, while keeping all the data secure.
By leveraging tools including a PIX/PDQ Manager, XDS Registry and Repository, and secure HL7 messages, William received better treatment from caregivers who were well-informed with his history – even when some records were tagged as belonging to Bill Smith.
The best part is, this works in the real world, too. We have several RHIO and HIE customers who are sharing data amongst themselves on a daily basis, improving care for real patients.
One such customer spans several counties across two states, serving more than half a million residents in multiple hospitals and hundreds of physicians, many of whom are rural. The region has high rates of chronic diseases.
This innovative customer developed and operates a secure network that allows physician offices, hospitals, public health departments, pharmacies, laboratories and imaging centers to communicate electronically to improve patient care and safety while reducing costs.
Their network supports programs for medication management, diagnostic services, preventative medicine and disease management.
Click to enlarge and see how data flows through a real HIE
This customer’s portal solution gives their community of providers access to a consolidated view of patient data across participating organizations and enables community-wide workflows and messaging. Each participating physician practice, hospital and health department also has their own document repositories full of patient data, but by sharing that relevant information with the PIX/PDQ manager, that relevant information is available regardless of where the patient is treated throughout the RHIO.
The project’s goals helped focus the resources and discussion, and have come to fruition:
- Provide patient information on demand at the point of care by incorporating data from federated and centralized data repositories
- Enable decision support information at the point of care to enable preventative medicine, chronic disease management and patient-specific information with specific patient consent
- Empower patients to make healthy choices and informed decisions
- Deliver selected de-identified aggregate data for population health improvement
Additionally, as user adoption continues to grow, projects using health information to improve health and cost outcomes have already shown results: providers are prescribing more generic medications (resulting in cost savings for patients and purchasers), while self-management and home-monitoring of patients with diabetes and congestive heart failure have significantly reduced the rates of hospitalizations and emergency room visits for these patients.
Other related efforts have begun to reduce tobacco use, childhood obesity, prescription drug addiction and overdose, and to improve emergency preparedness‐all powered by the availability of data.
These results didn’t happen overnight, but came about through cooperation, planning and attention to standards and data governance policies. Such factors are essential in the formation and success of any health information exchange.
This is part of Bill Klaver's series, Building a Health Information Exchange Through International Standards. For other posts in the series, visit the Table of Contents.
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