Healthcare Technology Featured Article

July 24, 2014

Health Information Exchanges Can Improve Patient Care


Integrated health service models are helping hospitals across the globe increase efficiency while cutting costs and ultimately improving patient care. They are supporting care doctors can provide from within or outside hospitals and are helping create an infrastructure that is integrating the delivery of medical services.

These findings are supported by Frost and Sullivan's recent report, Technologies Enabling Home Medical Devices and Integrated Care Systems, describes health information exchanges as an integral part of developing healthcare models. As a broad description, HIEs facilitate the exchange of electronic information between a number of health providers which subscribe to the exchange. They are meant to help provide healthcare practitioners with easy access to relevant information about their patients so they can provide accurate, efficient care.

Within Frost and Sullivan's announcement of its latest report, it provided a quote from Technical Insights Research Analyst Bhargav Rajan who discusses the ramifications HIEs can have on the medical industry.

"These changes are likely to have far-reaching consequences for healthcare delivery, particularly in predictive diagnosis and population health management," Rajan said. "Instead of functioning merely as workflow aids, information systems are likely to transform the very nature of healthcare planning and delivery, ushering in predictive analytics and coordinated care management."

Necessarily, HIEs require a great deal of cooperation among healthcare providers. This is one problem Frost and Sullivan point out in the research. Many countries have systems that, because of their fragmentation, are not directly compatible with each other. This may include differences in ways they transmit information to the file types they use most often.

This places pressure on technology providers to create HIE systems that will work with a broad range of healthcare networks. In addition, the systems must be easy enough to adopt, and valuable enough to use, that healthcare providers will individually work to alter their own systems in such ways that they will better work with the overall frameworks HIEs present.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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