News Feature | April 1, 2014

Meaningful Use Spurs HIE Growth

Katie Wike

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

HIE Growth From Meaningful Use

HIEs ‘beginning to take off’ according to eHealth expert

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission hosted a workshop - Examining Health Care Competition - designed to “examine competition issues related to certain current developments in the U.S. health care industry.” The FTC held the workshop as part of mission is to focus “its resources to ensure that health care markets benefit from competition and innovation, both of which can reduce costs and increase the quality and accessibility of health care for consumers.”

One of the speakers, Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of the Massachusetts eHealth Collaborative, said. “Up until five years ago, the healthcare system had notably underinvested in electronic health records and health information exchange compared both to other sectors in the economy and other industrialized countries. But, we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress based on the Meaningful Use program over the last few years.”

According to Health Data Management, Tripathi explained that HIT means electronic health records or other clinician-based applications that help with treatment, such as decision support, diagnostics, documentation, and order entry. However, HIE “refers to the technologies that allow those distinct instances to talk to each other.

“Health information exchange is a verb and it’s multi-layered and demand-driven with lots of people wanting to do this from the bottom up, which is a good thing,” Tripathi said. “It’s much more tactically focused led by a wide variety of organizations, some of them state-level kinds of organizations but more and more the private HIE phenomenon which is accountable care organizations and others who are doing it to serve that immediate business need.

“Query and retrieve is now starting to grow as a market phenomenon, not yet a part of Meaningful Use requirements. So, there’s a little bit now where the market is getting out ahead of where Meaningful Use is. We’ll see where that goes but it’s certainly growing and developing.”