This article explains how fourth-generation HIEs are currently being leveraged to enhance clinical collaboration and workflows, while improving patient care.
By Paul Steinichen, Vice President of Solutions Engineering, Sandlot Solutions
Health care providers have some heavy lifting to do. They are expected to lift health care quality scores and improve health care processes while managing dwindling resources. Collaboration is the key to this dilemma, and a new generation of Health Information Exchange (HIE) is the enabling technology.
At Sandlot Solutions, we use “Fourth Generation HIE” to describe a Health Information Exchange that also includes clinical data and analytics to improve decision making at the point-of-care and provide an integrated solution for population based healthcare. Specifically, advanced HIEs now incorporate the power of the community HIE (first generation) with the strength of managing community risk pools via the addition of claims data (second generation) and the care process management capabilities of a care management solution (third generation) to provide a complete, integrated population risk management and clinical integration solution (fourth generation). Fourth generation HIEs thus offer access to a comprehensive panel of administrative, clinical, and longitudinal patient information that is repurposed from a variety of disparate data sources and formats, as shown below.
HIEs create secure data exchange channels between providers, linking them to a centralized data repository that automatically collects and warehouses clinical information, which can in turn be accessed at the point-of-care in both acute care and non-acute settings. This new generation of HIEs captures both clinical information and payer information to ensure all relevant patient data is captured. Why is this important? First, we know that the lack of access to complete medical histories is a chief source of inaccurate diagnoses and creates situations for dangerous drug interactions. We also know that patients see many types of providers — some older patients see the pharmacists more than their doctor, for instance.
Download this guest column below to read more.