Health Information Exchange Research Paper

“Electronic health information exchange (HIE) allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other health care providers and patients to appropriately access and securely share a patient’s vital medical information electronically—improving the speed, quality, safety and cost of patient care” (HealthIT, 2014). Health Information exchange is becoming important in the communication between providers to provide the best care possible to patients. Every state along with their hospitals has their own way of exchanging information between each other.

Health information exchange or HIE allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other health care providers and patients to access vital medical information. It also allows them to share medical information securely and electronically. HIE improves the speed, quality, safety, and the cost of patient care.For many years patient's files were stored using paper methods, transferring them by mail, fax or transferred it by hand to every appointment. Changing to electronic file improves the completeness of patient's medical records. It makes decision making of healthcare providers avoid readmissions, avoid medication errors, improve diagnosis, and decreases the amount of times test are reordered. There are other benefits to health information exchange

Health information technology can advance the health of individuals and aid with the performance of providers to produce and improve quality and cost savings in patients’ health. In 2009, Congress passed, and former President Obama signed into law the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Buntin, Burke, Hoaglin and Blumenthal, 2011). Authorized by the HITECH Act, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology’s (ONC) has worked on health IT. The Health IT created legislation and regulations to provide requirements and certification criteria that the EHRs must meet to ensure health care

Electronic health record (EHR) system transformed the health care system from a paper based industry to one that uses clinical information to provide higher quality of care to the patients by providers. Electronic medical records have many benefits in clinical, organizational and societal outcomes. Clinical outcomes includes improvements in the quality of care and reduction of medical errors. Organizational outcomes include, financial and operational performance as well as higher satisfaction among patients and clinicians. Societal outcomes include, conduct research and attain improved population health. Adoption of EHR can improve quality and reduce the cost. Patient information is readily available on EHR and is accessible by any providers

Patient portals are becoming the way of life for people to keep track of his/her health. Medfusion and HealthVault are among two patient portals that rank high in popularity. When comparing the two sites, MedFusion and HealthVault allow the participant to keep track of important data such as weight, lab results, exercise, and daily intake of nutrition. They are different in ways that HealthVault is a personal health record. This website is web-based application that allows the participant to input his/her health and medical history (Information about the intuit health personal health record for patients, n.d). It allows the participant access to other apps and websites such as labs, pharmacies, and various insurance plans. Whereas, MedFusion is a patient portal that basically acts as an electronic medical record. On this website, a participant can send a request to reorder medication, pay a bill to their health provider, make appointments and send secure messages to his/her health provider (Information about the intuit health personal health record for patients, n.d.).

The Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA) of 1996 provides security provisions and data privacy for protecting a patient’s medical information. HIPAA has guidelines to ensure that a patient’s confidentiality is maintained while allowing the communication of a patient’s medical records between certain bodies or people or officials. Officials that a patient’s medical records can be shared with are other health care providers, health plans, business associates, and health care clearinghouses. HIPAA protects all “ individually identifiable health information”. There is a specific protocol to follow when sharing a patient’s medical information. Theses steps are imperative to maintaining the patient’s privacy.

Other than HIPAA, Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act is a major federal policy initiative that affects the healthcare information technology (HIT) in the past years. However, its policy is used to protect the EHR system from a security breach that can cause multi-million dollar fines to the company (Campus Safety Magazine, 2010). In 2009, President Obama signed HITECH Act as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with authority, so it can establish programs that will improve healthcare quality, safety, and efficiency using HIT (Hebda & Czar, 2013).

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) sets security standards for safeguarding important patient health information that is being stored and maintained in analog and digital forms. As new technologies continue to facilitate the healthcare industry’s transition to paperless processes, health care providers, insurance companies, and other institutions are also growing increasingly dependent on electronic information systems to manage their HIPAA compliance programs. As a result, the safety and security of sensitive health data has become a major concern across the board.

Practice Fusion is a cloud free base Electronic Health Records (EHR), platform physicians’ offices use as a method of storing and accessing patient information over the internet versus a computer database or hard drive. In addition, Practice fusion is helping to manage their patient population. Providers can utilize Practice Fusion system of connection to help coordinate care, which represents the largest healthcare ecosystem in the United States. Practice Fusion can offer services to make healthcare better. It’s not just for doctors and patients, but for labs also. Having more than six hundred, other than labs, they have imaging centers, pharmacies, billing solutions, and third-party applications. These members of the healthcare system can benefit by using Practice Fusion. The implementation of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has the potential to be costly for healthcare providers; Practice Fusion is free. Practice Fusion also facilitates a networking operation that connects healthcare providers with partners throughout the United States to include medical labs, pharmacies, and other medical facilities.

The first article was a summary of the HIPAA Privacy Rule. In the article, there was an introduction on what HIPAA meant and its importance. First off, HIPAA stands for the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 and it is a disclosure of patient information so that it is protected from unknown individuals and to assure that health providers abide by the privacy rule. Some key facts about HIPAA were, who was covered, what information is protected, and administrative requirements. Noncompliance and criminal penalties were some of the critical issues found in the article. Who is covered by the privacy rule? The privacy rule applies to health care plans, health care providers, and clearinghouses (U.S. Department of Health

This paper will illustrate how Hennepin County (HC) utilize monitor and maintain EHR records for the following business lines hospital, outpatient clinics, health, social and human service. Data sharing of EHR has allowed the organization to successfully provide care coordination for the population we serve. As healthcare evolves and service delivery continues to influence healthcare, it is essential that each business lines work together and collaborate to effectively access EHR within the Epic system. EHR systems, data bases, web portals are critical for a healthcare provider remain compliant with federal regulations. I am an HC employee, and my organization is unique, because we own and operate Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) and

Health information specialist is a blanket term that is applied to a variety of technical positions. Almost all of these jobs involve medical data, information technology, electronic health records and health information management systems. The BLS states that the job outlook for health information technicians is expected to continue growing at 15 percent, which is much faster than average.

Most people don’t think to worry or wonder where all of their information goes when they visit the doctor’s office, or how the doctor knew things about them from several years ago. They don’t ask the question especially when they go to a new doctor who knows the same thing about them that they’ve never talked about. Electronic Health Records, also known as EHR’s, are becoming some of the most important parts of medical offices around the country and are advancing more and more each day. Ever since the 80’s, EHR’s were being designed and formed, but not until 2009, when the HITECH Act came out, did they start becoming of key importance to the health care market. As they keep growing more and more each day, EHR’s are becoming vital to patient health.

Interestingly, the findings from the review of literature shed light to the challenges nurses encounter with the implementation of electronic health records and identify areas for improvement that could be made in an effort to achieve the goals of the HITECH act. Based on the review of literature, overall, the electronic health record is seen as a positive aspect to assisting nurses in providing positive outcomes for patients. However, challenges still exist with the daily utilization of the EHR, with communication among healthcare providers and interdisciplinary teams. These challenges present nurses with great difficulty as they attempt to provide care to their patients. Because some nurses continue to struggle with utilizing the electronic

Current use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) has proven to be helpful for hospitals and independent medical practice to provide efficient care for patients. Balestra reports that using computers to maintain patient health records and care reduces errors, and advances in health information technology are saving lives and reducing cost (Balestra, 2017). As technology advances EHR are going to continue to be the main method of record keeping among medical providers. Therefore, staff and medical providers need to be trained on how to properly share patients EHR safely and in a secure form in order to maintain patient confidentiality. As records were shared electronically rules were implemented for clinicians to follow known as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996 (Summary of the HIPAA Security Rule ,2013). These rules were implemented for clinicians to protect the