My colleague, Terie McClintock, wrote a blog from HIMSS yesterday about health information exchanges. In her post, Terie discusses how health information exchanges can enable collaborative care, improve patient safety, and reduce costs, among other benefits.
Missed diagnoses are common at the doc’s office. Many diseases have common symptoms … to add to that, physician communication with patients during an office visit is decreasing to an average visit of 7 minutes. How can data fill this gap? One very important aspect is accurate patient history. How many times have you flown through the endless list of forms and forgotten to check the box that said that your grandfather suffered from a chronic medical condition? How many times have you relayed your medical history through “rose colored glasses”?
Oracle’s Health Information Exchange is a platform that can be leveraged by providers to turn data into “actionable information” that enables collaborative care initiatives. Drivers for HIE include:
- Provide clinician access to comprehensive health information. Greater access to patient health information provides clinicians a holistic view of their patients and enables clinicians to make more informed clinical decisions at the point of care.
- Improve patient care and safety. Clinical gaps in care alerts against evidence-based guidelines and protocols help clinicians better manage patients with chronic conditions and provide preventive healthcare services to all patients. Access to health information recorded by other clinicians, such as allergies and medication history, helps reduce potential adverse drug events.
- Enhance care team collaboration. The secure exchange of health information among care team members improves care team collaboration and leads to more coordinated transitions in care.
- Reduce healthcare costs. Improved patient safety; reduction of redundant, clinically unnecessary treatments; lower rates of readmissions; and improved patient outcomes will ultimately lead to lower healthcare costs.
- Lay the groundwork for value-based healthcare. Once health information is available electronically, it can be aggregated and normalized to become semantically interoperable and analyzed. Robust business intelligence and analytic tools to measure quality and outcomes against industry benchmarks will provide the foundation for population health, care, and disease management initiatives and identify clinical best practices across the entire delivery network. By combining clinical and financial health information, Health Information Organizations can measure and monitor clinical, operational, and financial performance of its accountable care or value-based healthcare initiatives.
To read Terie’s full post, click here. Visit us at the HIMSS 2013 conference in Booth 1555 to learn more about how we can help with health information exchanges.
