Health Information Exchange (HIE)
The ONC and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services are both looking to the future and plotting long-term information exchange and interoperability policy strategies.
Cat and dog owners know that pets that chase their tails will eventually catch them – but they won’t stay caught for long. Healthcare providers who manage the exchange of health information understand the feeling.
CommonWell Health Alliance announced this week that Mobile, Ala.-based CPSI and Tucson, Ariz.-based Sunquest Information Systems are the two latest vendors to sign on to the interoperability organization.
With more than $500 million in HITECH Act startup funding set to run out by the end of the year, too many health information exchanges "haven't figured out how to fund themselves."
Healthcare, which has always been based on the doctor-patient interaction, is nearing the end of Stage 1 meaningful use, and as the industry increases its reliance on electronic health records, it faces a new challenge. That conundrum, says Nick van Terheyden, MD, and CMIO at Nuance Communications, is how to reconcile the need for standardized structured data capture with the importance of narrative in patient-doctor interactions.
At the Government Health IT Conference and Exhibition in Washington this week, chief information officers from the Military Health System and the U.S. Navy offered candid discussion about the way they make their IT decisions -- most notably with regard to the EHR system DoD is looking to acquire.
There has been some buzz lately about how interoperability is a non-issue. I beg to differ. With increasing pressure from federal initiatives like Meaningful Use Stage 2, there is growing need for information exchange across the industry.
More than a third of physician practices plan to purchase, replace or upgrade ambulatory EHR systems, according to HIMSS Analytics' newest Ambulatory Electronic Health Record & Practice Management Study. Meanwhile, nearly half of physician groups say they'll join an HIE.
As the Department of Defense looks for a new EHR system and aims to improve information sharing for veterans with lifetime digital health records, there are also several key patient privacy questions to consider.
Ever since the updated HIPAA rule took effect last March, some hospital IT departments see themselves as "the HIPAA police," clamping down in ways that the rule doesn't require, says one industry expert.