HIE: Is 2012 the big year?
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HIMSS held a one-day symposium during its annual conference last month called "HIE: The Year of Implementation, Collaboration & Beyond." Meanwhile, ONC said the next layer of core standards and policies will advance the growth and spread of HIE.
“The focus on the adoption and use of a few core standards and policies will ensure that information can truly follow patients as they move across the healthcare system and that the cost and complexity of exchange is reduced,” according to an article by several members of ONC and published in the March issue of Health Affairs.
The authors stated that electronic HIE addresses a critical need in the U.S. healthcare system to have information follow patients to support patient care. However, the authors cited a 2009 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey that found 73 percent of the time, primary care providers in the U.S. do not receive discharge information from hospitals within two days of their patients’ discharge.
Additionally, “the lack of widely adopted standards, failure to use existing standards, and flexibility in the way that standards are implemented have all contributed to the high cost of exchange,” wrote the authors.
ONC will address three gaps to advance and scale forms of exchange (query-based, consumer-mediated and directed exchange) across organizational and vendor boundaries including provider directories, certificate discovery and management and governance. The office is working with public- and private-sector stakeholders to establish policy recommendations for these key issues that could be implemented through a variety of mechanisms, including Nationwide Health Information Network governance rules, the health IT certification program and guidance to the office’s grant program recipients.
“The growth and spread of query-based exchange will be supported by advancing the policy, technical and governance requirements to support phased, modular development of exchange capabilities that allow providers to find information on a patient,” the authors concluded. “The ONC will work with federal partners to expand patients’ access to their own data and tackle the policy, implementation and technical issues to support consumer-mediated exchange.”
Is 2012 the big year for HIE at your facility? Please share your thoughts.
Beth Walsh
CMIO Editor
bwalsh@trimedmedia.com
Beth Walsh,
Editor
Editor Beth earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and master’s in health communication. She has worked in hospital, academic and publishing settings over the past 20 years. Beth joined TriMed in 2005, as editor of CMIO and Clinical Innovation + Technology. When not covering all things related to health IT, she spends time with her husband and three children.