Benefits of Health Information Exchange

Benefits of Health Information Exchange

Health information exchange (HIE) system helps in improving the quality, safety, speed and cost of patient’s healthcare by allowing doctors, nurses or any other medical care individual to appropriately access and securely share a patient’s medical information electronically.

Electronic Health information exchange improves the record maintaining capacity of the patient which in turn has a great impact on patient medical treatment. Due to the health information exchange past history, the current dosage of medications and all the other medical information can be seen at once by the doctor or any other medical care representative.

Time to time sharing of patient information helps patient in taking a certain decision and also allows providers to make the treatment easy by:

• Avoiding readmissions of patients
• Avoiding errors in medications
• Improving the level of diagnoses
• Avoiding duplicate testing

Benefits of Health Information Exchange in Medical Department

Health Information Exchange plays an important role in medical department as it is very important to keep a track of the patient complete medical history. HIR helps in providing a good track of treatment to the patient by keeping track of the current and past medical conditions of the patient. It also helps in reducing the cost of treatment by avoiding duplicate treatment and other medical errors.

Other Benefits of HIE

1. Time efficiency: Since, the Health Information Exchange system enables the user to exchange medical information over the internet, which is just a matter of minutes, the precious time spent in sending the documents or faxing them can be saved.
2. Environment-Friendly: Recording the information on paper generally requires lots of pages, especially when we bring cardiograms into the picture. If one patient requires let’s say 100 pages for their medical record, imagine the humongous amount of papers required for the entire hospital. Conversion of the data into digitized form saves tons of papers, thus, making the environment happier.
3. Reduced Maintenance: Taking care of files, reports and other documents can be a very exhausting task and in case of misplacement, catastrophic consequences are inevitable. Thus, digitalization of the records reduces the risk of loss of data to a great level. If the transfer of the data is secured using encryption and other techniques, the risk can be mitigated.
4. Error Free Database: There are chances when ambiguity arises due to the bad handwriting of the medical authority and leads to a state of confusion. To avoid that, Health Information Exchange eliminates the requirement of writing the data and thereby replaces it with the typing of the data. Also, connecting the HIE systems with various instruments used in diagnosis can prove to be an advantage as the analysis and figures are directly stored in the system rendering the task of manually inserting data unnecessary.
5. Improvisation in the clinical outcomes: With the elimination of manual data recorders and reduction of time which exchange of information quick and effective decision can be made and quick recovery of the patient can be assured.