Can HIEs Improves Patient Outcomes?

Tuesday, December 18th, 2012 at 11:09

Healthcare Technology Online recently released a mini white paper, titled “Health Information Exchanges: Improving Patient Outcome through Technology and Healthcare.”

The article, by Paul Steinichen, Vice President of Solutions Engineering at Sandlot Solutions, explains how fourth-generation HIEs are currently being leveraged to enhance clinical collaboration and workflows, while improving patient care.

In this brief article the author maintains that “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.”

I agree that HIEs have great potential to improve patient care, but I am not so sure that we have any of these fourth generation HIEs in operation. Perhaps there are some private or closed systems that doing this, but no public ones that I am aware of.

What are your thoughts.

Here are some additional videos on Sandlot’s HIE approach and some articles on HIE data analytics.