Some experts feel health plans are what will drive the success of health information exchanges (HIEs). HIEs won’t be able to be set up everywhere, as the health reform law stipulates that payers must get involved,” Gary Austin, principal and co-founder of TranzformHealth, a Las Vegas-based healthcare consultancy, told Jennifer Prestigiacomo.
But HIEs are certainly first and foremost in the new world of healthcare. In an interview conducted by David Brailer, M.D., former coordinator of health IT, in the March issue of Health Journal, Farzad Mostashari, M.D. says they are up and coming and ready for prime time.
HIEs are set up “to create a standardized interoperable model that is patient centric, trusted, longitudinal, scalable, sustainable, and reliable” and to ensure secure access, use, and “control of health information in a safe, high quality, cost effective, and timely manner.”
In the Health Journal interview, released online and reported on by healthcareinformatics.com, Mostashari, the current coordinator of health IT, forecasts that 50 percent of physicians will have converted from paper to electronic health records (EHRs) within the next few years. Just three years ago, only 20 percent had convereted.
The statistics are encouraging: about 62 percent of specialists use health IT for e-scheduling and e-billing, almost as many U.S. physicians enter patient notes electronically, and e-prescribing is used by 54 percent of U.S. primary care physicians, according to a recent study by Accenture, as reported by healthitupdate.nextgov.
In his interview with Brailer, Mostashari also said that nearly 2,000 US hospitals and more than 41,000 doctors have now met the standards for achieving meaningful use of health IT, and have received $3.1B in federal incentive payments as a result.
But what will drive the healthcare IT world will not be simply the adoption of EHRs, but sharing the information contained in them throughout healthcare organizations and HIEs. “Stakeholders must advance the development of health information exchanges,” Nicole Lewis writes, referring to recommendations made on how to advance a totally connected healthcare environment, in a report released last week by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Another recent study found that nearly 70 percent of respondents “are currently planning for an HIE, despite their perceptions of high start-up costs and other governance issues,” according to a story by Mike Millard.
Edited by
Carrie Schmelkin
