HIMSS14: Various roles of HIEs can support goals beyond local community

ORLANDO—HIEs are not one size fits all and can have many faces depending on the use case, according to a presentation at the Health Information and Management Systems Society's annual conference.

Two representatives from Texas Health Resources (THR), a hospital network serving north Texas, were on hand to offer their organization’s experiences with implementing an HIE and the different roles HIEs can play.

Patricia Johnston, vice president of innovative technology solutions for THR, said the organization had a set of goals it wanted to achieve with its HIE, which included enhancing provider communication, increasing patient satisfaction and reducing costs. THR also wanted a technology-agnostic connection to other providers and to support Meaningful Use criteria.

A survey of THR physician documentation needs was sent out to determine which data elements physicians considered the most important to include in the HIE to help in the treatment of patients, according to Johnston. The top rated elements were discharge summaries, radiology reports, EKGs, lab results, cardiology studies and medications. Within imaging, the modalities for which physicians thought it would be especially helpful to have the actual images including EKG, x-ray and CT, while most were content with written reports for ultrasound, echocardiograms, endoscopy, cardiac cath and nuclear medicine studies.

One of the roles that an HIE can serve is as an enterprise connector, explained Debbie Jowers, THR’s director of enterprise architecture & integration services. The THR HIE connects wholly-owned hospitals and affiliated physician groups, and will continue to expand to include more partners.

Jowers said HIEs can also be a community asset, supporting regional and statewide HIEs to serve patients over a wider area. Additionally, HIEs can be a population aggregator that supports population health and various accountable care organization arrangements. This wider view can benefit patients transitioning between settings or during post-acute care. It also can provide a powerful avenue to collect valuable analytics on population health.

While the implementation process is hard work and organizations must be focused on their ultimate goals, Johnston ended the presentation with a call to action. “If there was ever a time for us to be able to fully, freely, easily exchange health information, surely that time is now.”