Impact Of HIEs Still Unknown

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Research has yet to demonstrate benefits and cost savings attributed to HIE use.

Despite the hype surrounding the potential of HIEs to advance healthcare by transforming patient care and improving outcomes, a study published on Health Affairs has found this might not be the case. The study found the benefits and cost savings attributed to the use of HIEs have not been clearly identified by the bulk of research on such exchanges.

Despite The Spread Of Health Information Exchange, There Is Little Evidence Of Its Impact On Cost, Use, And Quality Of Care was conducted by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Indiana University. It scrutinized 27 articles which contained 94 individual analyses of HIE usage in patient care. Researchers found that, while 57 percent of the analyses reflected some form of benefit from HIEs, only six of the articles included a model with strong internal validity such as randomized controlled trials or quasi-experiments. Ultimately, the study concludes the assumption HIEs provide cost savings and patient care benefits was not strongly supported by the current body of research on the topic.

That is not to say that benefits of HIEs do not exist or that HIEs are detrimental to healthcare delivery and outcomes, it merely suggests that the final results have not yet been tallied.

One of the difficulties in assessing the value of HIEs is the fact that stakeholders explore vastly different options and alternative models for sharing vital diagnosis and treatment information. Those models vary among both public and private HIE network members, depending on their needs.

And as Managed Care Magazine notes, “Touted as a cost-saving and quality improvement tool, HIEs — public and private — are just beginning to show what they can do.”