Health Information Exchange

By Greg Chittim

Welcome to the health information exchange section of the Arcadia Solutions Blog. I’m your host, Greg Chittim, a Director in Arcadia’s provider practice. I spend my days at Arcadia working with clients to build new technology and data assets (and to better leverage those they already have) that  best serve the interests of their patients and practices. I am currently running a national pilot project for the Direct messaging standard, and am involved with a number of state and regional HIE development projects. Health information exchange is central to most of the critical health information technology issues and trends of the day, and I am extremely excited to be part of the evolving story.

Accurate, aggregated and accessible clinical data is critical to the future of healthcare and the health of patients. This quality data must be captured at the point of care in a structured way so  that it can be feasibly aggregated and used to understand and improve the quality of care being delivered individually or across a population. Aggregated data must then be sharable with those who need it most – members of the care team, patients, and other interested parties.

The term “HIE” is used regularly, often as a catch-all term that includes the storage, sharing, and display of clinical data for use by a myriad of stakeholders. As we continue this discussion over the coming weeks and months, I will use the term in a few different ways:

• “HIE” – the capital HIE – Health Information Exchange as a noun – is a repository of health data. A physical data warehouse or network of smaller HIEs, a Health Information Exchange is often conceived and administered by a state or local government, a public-private entity, and/or a large health system.
• “hie” – the lowercase hie – the exchange of health information as a verb – is the act of transmitting clinical or claims information from one party to another. This may occur with or without the presence of an HIE, and may utilize one of many other software systems or integration points

In future postings, I plan to cover:

• The basics of both HIE and hie – what are the key issues, who are the big players, and how is the state of the art evolving
• Direct messaging and the evolving trends in hie
• NwHIN and HIE at the Federal level
• State and regional HIEs
• News of the days and interesting posts from thought leaders around the country