Over the past few years, the healthcare industry has begun to heavily rely on technology to document, track, and disseminate medical information. The sharing of data is a huge challenge, as it is currently difficult to share individual patient information between different medical providers. This sharing of information becomes even more important when a patient moves from one care provider to another, and there are opportunities to improve this technology for ease of use and efficiency.
Need for Coordinated Care
When care of patients is not coordinated, there are holes and redundancies in treatment that cost an extra $150 billion to $225 billion each year. Giving patient care that is well coordinated, physicians and other healthcare providers need access to information located in different facilities where a patient has received care. Patient health information can reside in many different locations: physician offices, hospitals and clinics, laboratories and radiology centers, health plans, pharmacies, and nursing homes.
Because of this, the electronic exchange of information across these different facilities that deliver care is key to delivering well-coordinated treatment. To have the ability to exchange information among different electronic health record (EHR) systems is necessary to provide top-notch care.
Digital Obstacles
A recent survey of healthcare providers showed that the lack of interoperability between electronic systems, the lack of an infrastructure for information exchange, and the cost of setting up these interfaces and exchanges to be, by far, the primary obstacles to electronically sharing information to aid clinical care. In fact, in another survey, more than half of the physicians contacted said that the fact that their technology does not interface with other systems is a major obstacle to accessing information outside of their system.
Another area that is a major problem with sharing data is matching patient data across the different care providers where patients have received care. Patient records sometimes are linked but should not be. Also, different providers use different methods for identifying patients. Not all electronic systems use the same attributes to identify patients, and there is no general agreement on which attributes should be used. Also, to match patient data from different providers, the data has to be accurate, and often it is inaccurate or outdated.
Devising a Solution
To improve the situation, those in the medical profession must engage with hospitals and other providers, as well as IT organizations, to come to an agreement on common information needs and the steps that need to be taken to meet those needs.
They would have to address questions about what types of information is needed and what the greatest priorities are, how the information would best be received and delivered, what are reasonable timelines for sharing the information, what workflow considerations are involved, and what policies are needed to facilitate information sharing.
Electronic health record vendors, health information exchanges, and other health IT services, along with health insurers, laboratories, pharmacies, and imaging centers, also need to be included in the discussion to identify and prioritize information sharing needs.
What is needed to improve the electronic sharing of information is a widespread agreement on clear standards that apply to all EHR systems and these standards should be put into practice in a consistent way. A good deal of progress has been made in areas such as data content, vocabularies and transport standards in the last several years. The implementation of these standards is being given an added push because the federal government also has adopted them and tied them to the requirements of the CMS Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs.
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