Health Information Exchange – A Glimpse of Future Health Technology

Health information exchange (HIE) refers to confidential and secure information sharing among healthcare institutions. The HIEs are governed by Health Information Organizations (HIOs) which are in quest to create a standardized model that ensure HIE’s confidentiality and security. Like EHR, Healthcare information exchange will evolve over time before it gets its final form. It may not ever get its final form as healthcare technology is ever evolving. Further advancements will keep on adding features to the standardized healthcare information exchange model. One may say that the final model of HIE will be all the way patient centric, reliable, scalable, and sustainable.

In an article “The value of health care information exchange and interoperability”, Walker J and colleagues discussed the value of HIEs between providers and independent laboratories and public health departments. Through a cost benefit model, they empirically proved net value of dollar 77.8 billion per year upon implementation of standardized HIEs. The non-standardized HIEs also proved to offer positive monetary benefits. HIEs implementation is a compelling and beneficial project that should be pursued to reform healthcare industry.

Fig. Health Information Exchange - Connectivity, Integration & Interoperability

Reference:

http://www.ahima.org/resources/hie.aspx

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15659453