Barriers to sharing patient clinical data electronically among rival hospitals, physicians, and health plans remain high as concerns about loss of competitive advantage and data misuse hamper participation in local health information exchanges, according to results of a study released Feb. 25 by the Center for Studying Health System Change (HSC) and the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation. The study’s findings are detailed in a new HSC-NIHCM research brief, Creating Sustainable Local Health Information Exchanges: Can Barriers to Stakeholder Participation Be Overcome?
The study examined stakeholder perspectives--hospitals, physicians, health plans, employers, and others--on participation in four health information exchanges (HIEs), which support the electronic sharing of clinical data among independent hospitals, physicians, and other healthcare stakeholders in a community. By offering physicians more timely and complete medical records at the point of care, HIEs have the potential to improve healthcare quality and efficiency, and to aggregate clinical data across patients for uses such as quality improvement and pay-for-performance activities, public health, and clinical research.
However, the complexities of implementing an HIE in the four communities studied suggest that achieving the broad vision of health information exchange will take a long time to achieve, the study concludes. Read the research brief.
