Health information exchange (HIE) has offered some healthcare providers an opportunity to experience growing pains, but a recent study found that HIEs are responsible for reducing the amount of redundancy in emergency rooms.
The University of Michigan’s Mathematica Policy put its researchers to work finding out what the impact of HIEs has had on emergency rooms. Particularly, they looked at CT scans, X-rays and ultrasound imaging and found that these areas were significantly impacted by HIEs
and save healthcare providers millions of dollars. A radiology information system that is built with the right specifications is working in favor of the providers.
Researchers found that emergency departments working with an HIE were nearly nine percent less likely to have repeat CT scans and ultrasounds, and 13 percent less likely to have repeat X-rays of the chest. This gives HIEs a significant boost in the eyes of providers considering an HIE but have yet to pull the trigger. For small, rural healthcare institutions, such savings are going to be significant to say the least because the critical care hospitals are notoriously crunched for cash and every little bit of savings helps.
One of the reasons larger emergency departments are affected at greater lengths is because they often have the imaging equipment located within the department and make greater use of the equipment, whereas rural providers are often working with bare bones equipment in their rural emergency room facilities.
A radiology information system is an excellent place to store medical imaging that can be shared with any number of providers in any facility, especially if the HIE is linked to vendor neutral archiving system. This technology makes CD burning technology obsolete.
CD burners were the first line of defense after radiology departments switched from film to digital imaging. The cumbersome CD burners did little to stop the redundancies that were already problematic with film, mostly because patients and doctors were still handling a physical copy of the images. It isn’t uncommon for these CDs to be improperly burned, which means the redundancy level increases with every malfunction. Furthermore, storage space is still a factor with radiology and emergency departments storing CDs.
HIEs tied to a vendor neutral archiving system also offer better security assurances that physically storing film or CDs could not. It’s neither difficult, nor uncommon for CDs to be misplaced. Every misplaced CD represents a possible HIPAA regulation violation and fine. HIEs offer an alternative, not only to redundant processes, but also to storage issues that too many healthcare providers struggle with in their archaic archiving methods.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., has established methods that reduce the redundancies found in emergency rooms. OffSite has also figured out a way to securely store images and share them between disparate digital silos. This not only offers healthcare providers the security they are looking for in order to stay in line with HIPAA regulations, but they’re also improving the way they deliver quality patient care.