The healthcare industry is evolving, and the technologies have enhanced their operations. Amongst them, at the top technical advancement position is the effective HIE interoperability.
HIE stands for Electronic Health Information Exchanges. It allows healthcare providers to share the patient’s digital medical data securely. Implementing interoperability enables the computer software to exchange or use this data efficiently.
Various organizations can improve patient care through HIE use.
Yet, hidden in the cracks of this system is the common challenges faced by HIE interoperability. Here’s how the industry could solve this issue without destroying its data system.
Top 3 Standard HIE Interoperability Challenges
To ensure the proper testing and development, facilities must use new digital health tools. These will help benefit the physicians and provide optimal treatment for the patient. Besides, it helps transmit medical information across the entire healthcare system.
Yet, various organizational leaders are skeptical about the advent of healthcare technologies like HIE interoperability challenges.
Also Read: How to Get Started with an HIE and the Future of HIEs
Here are some of the common shortcomings of this data-driven process
1. Lack of Consistency and Standards
Most healthcare IT vendors currently do not have a consistent patient identification process. Providers who service large networks in the healthcare spectrum face conflicting information as a huge problem. It happens due to the endless exchange of data across the network providers.
HIE interoperability works by exchanging and modifying information sourced from the patients. At the same time, this technology makes it hard for vendors to interchange the data from one record to another software.
Due to this, the external data fields and other proprietary formats become inconsistent. In turn, hampering the standards of the imported data.
The common things like name, DOB, Social Security, and other details get shuffled without a proper trace. This issue occurs because the information gets stored differently in the systems, allowing for errors in patient identification.
The health IT sectors waste numerous hours searing for the data from disparate multiple places.
2. Presence of Information Blocking
This HIE interoperability issue arises from the competition aspect in the healthcare industry. There is a lack of shared data in the healthcare sector worldwide. Besides, information blocking has become a significant impediment to this technology.
The vendors usually practice information blocking when they feel dissatisfied with something.
There is a fee involved for transmitting that information outside their system and to organizations for every data share. Indeed, this practice is disruptive to the healthcare data flow and could hamper patient treatment.
Hospital systems compete to gain information on the patients with urgent care requirements. Infuriatingly, the motivation to share this data is slim, but laws have set organizational boundaries.
The fight to stop this issue of information blocking is underway, but the industry is seeing little progress.
3. Difficulty Measuring the Improvement of HIE Interoperability
“Vendors cannot improve what they cannot measure” – This saying resonates with the HIE interoperability challenges faced by numerous healthcare organizations.
With this new technology, organizations find it hard to quantify costs. Consequently, it creates higher error rates and issues in the healthcare system. Besides, without measurable ability, the facilities cannot track outcomes from the health systems.
It hinders the improvement of the process, which stops interoperability from taking place.
Both the vendors and their partners find it hard to track the interoperability process’s lack of standardized and measurable impact. It leads to quantifiable delays and failure in technical operations. Measuring these issues across the chain is crucial for analyzing the problem areas and improving the process.
Monitoring these changes becomes difficult for interoperability operations, decreasing the quality of care or patient outcome.
One Solution for Every HIE Interoperability Challenges – EHRs
All of these HIE interoperability challenges hamper the validation of electronic requests and reduce data availability. Hence, organizations must recognize these challenges and ask the vendors to overcome them effectively.
Only then can the healthcare industry apply it measurably and accountably. The industry must understand that interoperability significantly impacts the clients and providers alike. The only thing that could ensure the testing, use, and development of digital health tools is an EHR.
Why Choose an EHR?
An Electronic Health Record will benefit the patients, physicians, and vendors. They can effectively exchange medical information across clinics, hospitals, and everything in-between.
Organizations using healthcare interoperability should adopt a unified network and single interface that holds all the data. The information-sharing process becomes more superficial and less inconsistent, where the groundwork is uniform.
Did you know? Automated software can help with pulling uniform datasets.
The healthcare facility must trust a verified vendor with appropriate experience honing the interoperability benefits. Besides, using software for data requests would ascertain its accuracy and reduce information blocking.
The industry must leverage automation and the advantages of human inspection to reduce the lack of standards.
Once the facility has trusted a verified provider with an effective EHR system, they must uniformly export the data from a single place. This way, the online portal created would allow access to a standalone central site. Therefore, the information becomes accessible to proper entities whenever required.
It would be best to hire a specialized software platform that maintains the EHR and ensures effective HIE interoperability.
The Bottom Line
The world of healthcare is transforming into a digital entity. Most of the patient data come from digitally organized systems like the HIE. However, this HIE interoperability technology always comes with various challenges.
Issues with consistency, lack of improvement, and data blocking are the standard issues any organization could face. Luckily, there’s one solution that triumphs all the HIE interoperability challenges.
The healthcare industry would systematically benefit from the Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. If they invest more in collecting accurate patient data and electronically storing them, the digital format would be more reliable.
This way, the issues will get solved, and the organizations could focus on offering the best health care.
