The fact of today's world is that patient's medical records do not reside in one system. I don't know anyone today that has only ever been to one doctor, it just doesn't happen. So, it's no wonder that we have trouble accessing a patient's full medical record, and verifying their identity across or even within systems.
Patient identity is a hot topic everywhere we turn.
There are a lot of opinions out there and no one has conjured the perfect recipe just yet. The CHIME National Patient ID Challenge initiative has gotten a lot of buzz, and while the $1,000,000 in prize money is a nice motivator, I’d like to think that everyone has a more altruistic motivation.
Whether you’re an IT geek, a provider, or a patient, we all have a stake in getting it right. We all win if we get it right. It is worth our time to make a plan, and execute it flawlessly.
It seems that I cannot even open my email these days without seeing an article, podcast, or contest (yes, I said contest — more on that later) about the enormous problem hospitals are facing of accurately identifying patients. Why now, in 2016, is this seemingly becoming a higher priority? I have a few theories:
Read More
Patient identity challenges are not going away
We had total control. We undid the registration, documentation, lab results, charges, and any other bits and pieces, only to re-enter them on the new patient and account. Boy did we complain!
Interoperability can mean many things.
Interoperability is one of those words that conjures up very different visuals for each of us. Paper cups attached by string, the WiFi router in your home, the towers and satellites that allow your text to be sent across the world in milliseconds, and the NASA space station, are all examples of interoperability.
In healthcare, it might mean electronically receiving the lab order from the doctor’s office, or aggregating and sharing in target-system-ese, the problems, meds, and allergies of every patient in Massachusetts.
Some might say the term interoperability is overused, but it’s shorter than saying, “take thousands of proprietary systems that were created as good ol', 'stand-alone, I don’t need anyone, I am king of the hill, you can’t boss me around,' and make them share information.”
I recently attended the first Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) annual meeting in Deer Valley, Utah. If you are not familiar with this group, it’s a group of regional or state HIEs that formed a collaborative late last year. (check out more information on their website here).
Population Health is top of mind for most healthcare IT leaders right now. Have you made moves to migrate your healthcare IT systems, or implement processes to help you with Population Health Management? If not, most likely, you are at least thinking about it, or doing some research on it.
If you Google “Population Health Management” you will get 77.5 million results, so there is no lack of information about population health management. But how do you make sense of what needs to happen for your organization to meet your population health goals? One step at a time…
Joining an HIE may have just gotten a boost, at least in some states. The recent news from the ONC announcing they’ve awarded $29.6M to twelve states and state designated entities for the purpose of moving interoperability and population health forward, led me to think about what this means for providers in these states and what opportunities may lie ahead for advancing the sharing of data, specifically within HIEs.
I recently presented at the International MUSE conference on the topic of HIEs. The main message was about how to control your data when connecting to an HIE. Of course, when talking about HIEs the conversation can turn to the subject of EMPIs. Several of the attendees mentioned having an EMPI, and, probing further, it was clear there is still a lot of confusion around how to make their EMPI solution work well for their specific situation.
Read More
Comments