What You Should Offer for the Best Health Information Exchange Services

best health information exchangeIn the healthcare industry, many professionals are reluctant to change. Take small doctor’s office across America as an example; you see many of them still using large file folders containing the medical history of patients. These are professionals who may not understand or embrace the value of electronic medical records. However, the best health information exchange services out there are providing an example of how detrimental this can be.

You also have patient privacy rights leaders sharing information that perpetuates the reluctance to change. Rather than offering consumers more control over their patient data, these people say that patients’ data is being sold for research or business analytics or any other use that compromises the safety and security of their medical history. The focus, others argue, should be on getting faster, more accurate diagnoses, which leads to better health.

The best health information exchanges focus on giving patients a chance to have their data available not only to medical professionals, but to the patient themselves. It’s through this approach that their conditions can be analyzed and an earlier indication of health issues and health status can be ascertained. It’s also through these exchanges that better courses of treatment can be established earlier, giving a patient a better chance at more quality years of life.

The best health information exchange is one where personal health information can be aggregated, which provides collective results that identify new treatments that can be effective not just for the individual, but everyone in the exchange.

Giving patients more access to their medical data can truly benefit them. For instance, if a patient were to purchase a health-monitoring device and have that data available to themselves, in real time, as well as to healthcare professionals who can analyze the data, a win/win scenario is established. Patients gain more knowledge about their condition and clinicians gain beneficial data that can be used to treat that patient and add insights that can benefit many others.

Obviously, there are risks to sharing data. Rarely a day goes by that someone’s health data hasn’t been compromised, either mistakenly or on purpose. However, newer technology is lessening the risks associated with compromising data. For example, information shared over the cloud is getting top-notch protection and disaster recovery services through Level IV data centers that double-up on security, both physically and virtually.

The best health information exchange has a tight focus on security because their very existence depends on keeping sensitive data in the hands of those who use it for the right purposes.

OffSite Image Management, Inc. is an organization focused on providing the most efficient services while also keeping security, safety and costs in mind. For rural providers who believe a cost-effective yet quality exchange solution is out of their grasp, OffSite has a solution that can help change that view.