There has been a sudden surge of interest in the term HIE 2.0 within the healthcare community. Providers are talking about how this will help them make better decisions and lead to better outcomes. Let us see what is it about and how is it different from HIE 1.0? To understand the second generation HIE (Health Information Exchange), we need to look at the first generation HIE or HIE 1.0.
Focused on creating a basic platform where providers and hospitals could interact with each other electronically especially with the help of EMRs, the first generation Health Information Exchange (HIE 1.0) was regarded as a simple, efficient and inexpensive method to share basic patient information. It would generally be used to assist orders for services such as ambulatory care and lab results. The result was a faster care delivery process in which information could be exchanged quickly between various healthcare entities. Population data was now more accessible, making it easier to spot patterns and trends of diseases and infections at a larger scale.
With an increase in the number of parties involved, it eventually became more difficult to handle such information through HIE 1.0. Practices began demanding complete patient data including their previous providers, payer organizations, physical therapists, hospitals and other medical entities, so the need for a wider platform to accommodate and integrate information from these parties grew gradually.
This demand led to the birth of the second generation Health Information Exchange (HIE 2.0). HIE 2.0 has the ability to accommodate data from a plethora of medical entities, making it easier for providers to understand, evaluate, assess and monitor the patients’ health. Backed by sophisticated EMR technology, this can help providers in their evaluation and assessment of patients along with a careful determination of diagnosis, ultimately helping them provide better care to their patients. HIE 2.0 is capable of handling a variety of transactions between a number of entities along with mulch-directional exchanges.
Together with clinical decision support systems within EMRs, it also gives providers instrumental tools for better coordination such as schedules and alerts.
Overall, healthcare providers working in different organizations can now view the patients’ data easily on their own systems without delays and can interact with other providers over the HIE 2.0 platform, thereby being able and better prepared to make more accurate clinical decisions for the betterment of patients. This also increases the efficiency, accuracy and administration of their practices. Patients are accurately treated and their records are instantly accessible through innovative tools such as Patient Portals.
In an era where there are a number of parties involved in the treatment of a single patient, HIE 2.0 is proving to be increasingly beneficial. With consistent advancements in healthcare technology, what remains to be seen is how well HIE 2.0 will evolve over the next few years.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
