At its most basic, health information exchange and data sharing have to do with how multiple organizations are able to access and share your patient’s private data. There are many aspects of this, but one of the most important is keeping patient confidentiality to ensure your facility stays compliant. Read on to learn about the health information exchange and what it means for your facility.
What is Health Information Exchange?
HIE or Health Information Exchange, is how both patients and providers are able to access and share the private data of a patient. In addition, this could also mean how two different organizations share this confidential health data. According to HIMSS, this includes providing “safe, timely, efficient, effective and equitable patient-centered care”.
Another term for this is “data sharing”. This term is much more straightforward and means any data that will be sent digitally between people or organizations.
Similar to HIPAA, the HIE requires that your facility has a secure way to share confidential patient data electronically. This means that basic texts, emails, and other forms of messaging may not provide the type of security needed.
Benefits of Health Information Exchange
According to HealthIT, there are many benefits to utilizing and participating in health information exchange. Some of these include increased efficiency, improved patient education, improved reporting and monitoring, additional feedback, and providing the basic guidelines for EHRs to function and operate in facilities.
Basically, health information exchange and data sharing can improve patient relationships through all of these measures. HIE prevents duplicate treatments and can clear up any patient history misunderstandings before they even happen. In addition, patients can become more involved in their healthcare because their providers are up to date on their needs and medical problems. This leads to happier patients and better experiences overall.
On top of the patient benefits, it also can help your facility run smoothly. By having a basic structure and guidelines for operating and sharing patient data, your facility can become more streamlined and increase its effectiveness in all areas of patient and outside organization interactions.
How Can Your Facility Stay Compliant?
As a healthcare facility, your number one concern is your patients. This also means that their data should be secure and safely shared when needed.
There are multiple ways your facility can stay compliant and follow all of the necessary procedures to ensure that your patients’ data is kept secure. For example, ensuring your EHR is up-to-date and integrates seamlessly with your other programs can be a huge step in staying compliant.
Another way to ensure that your patient’s data is shared securely is by using HIPAA-compliant chat and other compliant messaging features when sharing private data. Although this is directly related to HIPAA, the requirements of HIPAA and the health information exchange have similar guidelines when it comes to the security and privacy of patient data. Whenever patient data, including appointments, prescriptions, or test results are shared, this data should be sent through a secure platform in order to stay compliant.
Ensure All of Your Systems are Compliant With Notivate
Notivate’s platform is the easiest way to ensure that your health information exchange and data sharing stay compliant. We can easily integrate with any number of EHRs and provide a variety of features to ensure that your patients’ data is kept secure. If you would like to learn more about Notivate and how it can improve your facility’s HIE compliance, book a demo today.
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