Healthcare interoperability is the ability to exchange medical information between different healthcare software systems while maintaining the validity and usability of the data. It is vitally important for healthcare providers to be able to exchange this information as patient healthcare has become more and more splintered and involves more and more participants than ever. Not only doctors from different organizations, but also nurses, pharmacists, technicians and more from many different organizations now need to be able to access and modify the same information quickly and securely. This requires a high level of hospital interoperability. When different systems from different devices in different organizations are able to exchange and understand …show more content…
Emergencies are commonplace incidents in hospitals. During these times, patient information is quickly needed in order for clinicians to make timely decisions that could affect whether the patient fully recovers, dies, or any level in between such as a permanent disability. Most people today visit a variety of doctors in a variety of locations. If there is a low level of healthcare interoperability between these healthcare providers, the hospital dealing with the emergency could lose vital seconds or minutes waiting for information to be requested and received. Then the information would need to be reviewed because the computers don’t understand the data costing the patient even more time. Sometimes, the patient’s medical history can’t even be transmitted electronically and instead must be physically carried from one healthcare provider to another. Not only is this even slower, but the same problems can persist such as data being incompatible form system to system. Then on top of that, if the data is in an physical electronic medium such as a cd or usb flash drive, the healthcare organization might not even accept it because of fears of viruses. When a healthcare provider is regularly dealing with emergencies, every one of their patients coming from a vast variety of healthcare providers each with their own system, all manner of incompatibilities can arise. Each incompatibility costs time and manpower to overcome, both of which are the most valuable commodities in healthcare. Healthcare interoperability is critical and must be addressed when dealing with patient’s
Generally, the development and adoption of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) systems is based on the necessity and essence of technical standards in enhancing healthcare. However, the various health IT tools must comply with some data interchange standards in order to enhance access to clinical records, lessen clinical errors and risks to patient safety, and promote innovation in “individual-based” care (Hammond, Jaffe & Kush, 2009, p.44). The need for compliance with standards is fueled by their role in enabling aggregation of informa...
• Provides a basic level of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by individual physicians and organizations
As the evolution of healthcare from paper documentation to electronic documentation and ordering, the security of patient information is becoming more difficult to maintain. Electronic healthcare records (EHR), telenursing, Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE) are a major part of the future of medicine. Social media also plays a role in the security of patient formation. Compromising data in the information age is as easy as pressing a send button. New technology presents new challenges to maintaining patient privacy. The topic for this annotated bibliography is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Nursing informatics role is imperative to assist in the creation and maintenance of the ease of the programs and maintain regulations compliant to HIPAA. As a nurse, most documentation and order entry is done electronically and is important to understand the core concepts of HIPAA regarding electronic healthcare records. Using keywords HIPAA and informatics, the author chose these resources from scholarly journals, peer reviewed articles, and print based articles and text books. These sources provide how and when to share patient information, guidelines and regulation d of HIPAA, and the implementation in relation to electronic future of nursing.
Transfer of Information- The problem is remote access of the health records and pooling of large number of data for various purposes like research program and lab work, may lead to an error and confusion.
Errors caused by system problems can be prevented by working with your vendor to reset user preferences as needed. In order to preserve data quality and protect patient safety, it is very important that all medical records contain correct information for the safety and treatment of the patient. It is very important to note any cha...
The utilization of mobile devices and cloud computing in health organizations should be committed to protecting and respecting the privacy of protected health information and understanding the importance of keeping this information confidential and secure. The electronic health records and protected health information should be managed to ensure its security, confidentiality, integrity, and availability for authorized purposes. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) via the mobile devices and cloud computing should maintain a process to guarantee compliance with applicable provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). All members
“With tens of thousands of patients dying every year from preventable medical errors, it is imperative that we embrace available technologies and drastically improve the way medical records are handled and processed.”
Provides a basic level of interoperability among electronic health records (EHRs) maintained by individual physicians and organizations
An electronic health information exchange is the sharing of health related information between patients, providers, nursing staff, pharmacists and other health care organizations. The main objective of an electronic health information exchange (HIE) is for patients’ personal health information to be available, accessible, and sharable at any time and to follow them from physician to physician, increasing interoperability while decreasing cost and time. There are many benefits to an organization implementing a health information exchange; an HIE can decrease unnecessary services and reduce costs by making administrative duties more efficient. It also allows patients to get more involved with their own health care and encourages a better quality of care. The health information exchange improves the quality of care in healthcare organizations. One area of concern when being a part of the health information exchange is technical issues that could occur in the system. Getting patient information to successfully transfer from provider to provider, state agencies included, is a challenge that health information organizations can face. “Although these organizations have proven the ability to receive information, they have realized that a lack of consensus in terms of standards prevents them from pushing data effectively and economically.”(Milstine, 2011 p.761) This issue has the potential to be a problem for health information managers because HIM professionals must follow all laws and standards for protecting patient personal health information.
... that do not communicate with each other will need to be addressed. The implications of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act will lead to an investment in the transformation of healthcare systems. Ultimately, healthcare systems will become transformed to exchange health information between systems in order to deliver equitable high quality care to everyone. According to Kadry, Sanderson, and Macario (2010) clinicians need to understand workflow and recognize barriers to meaningful use. Poor user interface can lead to negative clinical outcomes (Kadry et al., 2010). Without a clear vision, “institutions will convert paper-based systems into expensive digital chaos” (Kadry et al., 2010, p. 185). Without proper workflow analysis, potentially the same outcome could occur.
Health information exchanges (HIEs), formalized at the state-level by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), were developed under Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in 2009. HIEs are the health information technologies (HITs) that mobilize the interoperability of personal health information (PHI) across providers, healthcare systems, and platforms (Magnuson, 2014). HIE allows healthcare providers and patients to access and securely share health information electronically. This exchange improves the efficiency, effectiveness of patient care, patient safety, and healthcare costs (US Department of Health and Human Services [US DHHS], 2014) by reducing duplication of services and medication errors and increasing
Health information management involves the practice of maintaining and taking care of health records in hospitals, health insurance companies and other health institutions, by the use of electronic means (McWay 176). Storage of medical information is carried out by health information management and HIT professionals using information systems that suit the needs of these institutions. This paper answers four major questions concerning health information systems.
Physicians, administrators, staff, and patients who are affiliated within the healthcare organization should understand the importance of interoperability by coming together to ease ...
Over the last several years, electronic medical records are becoming more prominent in health care facilities, replacing traditional written records. As many electronics are becoming more prevalent with the invention of numerous smartphones and tablet devices, it seems that making medical records available electronically would be appropriate for the evolving times. Even though they have been in use to some extent for many years, the “Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health section of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has brought paperless documentation into the spotlight” (Eisenberg, 2010, p. 8). The systems of electronic medical records mainly consist of clinical note taking, prescription and medication documentation,
The process of implementing an EHR occurs over a number of years. An electronic record of health-related information on individuals conforming to interoperability standards can be created, managed and consulted with the authorized health professionals (Wager et al., 2009). This information technology system electronically gathers and stores patient data, and supplies that information as needed to the healthcare professionals, as well as a caregiver can also access, edit or input new information; this system functions as a decision support tool to the health professionals. Every healthcare organization is increasingly aware of the importance of adopting EHR to improve the patient satisfaction, safety, and lower the medical costs. Studies have implied that, healthcare professionals who practice clinical features through EHR were far more likely to provide better preventive care than were healthcare professionals who did not.