Thompson Reuters has released its 10 best practices for building a statewide health information exchanges ...
... With approximately $400 million in federal stimulus dollars being funneled into local governments to develop statewide health information technology programs, states are rapidly developing Health Information
Exchanges (HIE) to streamline information sharing and the continuity of
patient care...
... Thompson Reuters examined current HIE proposals, historical precedents and case studies of successful prototype programs, and published its analysis in a whitepaper "Statewide Health Information Exchange: Best
Practice Insights from the Field."...
Thomson Reuters recommends the following:
- Obsess About Tactics, Not Strategy: The real purpose of HIE planning should be to define a meaningful pilot that meets the needs of local stakeholders.
- Plan for Mistakes: Ensure they are small and cheap: it is more expedient to get a small program up and running and learn from mistakes, rather than set goals that are too ambitious from the
onset. - Avoid the Conference Room Design Trap: It is critical to involve physicians and clinicians at the outset to determine what will be most beneficial on the frontlines where patients are
served. - Take Baby Steps - Go Live with Something: It is important to avoid the trap of tweaking the grand design toward perfection at the expense of launching something manageable.
- Avoid the Empty HIE Syndrome: The HIE is a means to an end; it needs to provide physicians with as many different types of information from as many different sources as possible.
- Focus on Clinical Use First: While an HIE serves many purposes, addressing the clinical use case is the most direct path to demonstrating the value of the HIE.
- Say No to an Opt-in Consent Policy: While it is vital to protect patient privacy in the HIE, opt-in environments have been shown to impede patient participation. An opt-out environment, by
contrast, preserves the rights of the patient without hindering
adoption. - Caregivers Cannot Drink from a Fire Hose: It is very easy to provide too much information in the data-rich HIE environment; the ideal programs have embedded analytic capabilities that
deliver an intelligence presentation of information. - Build Analytics Into the System at Start-Up: Systems designed to simply deliver content do not scale well to perform functions that require analysis; it is important that these systems are
undergirded with analytics technology. - Don't Become the State Electronic Records Provider: Focus on exchange: it can be counterproductive for the state to position itself as resident education and electronic records provider;
it is important to focus on the goal of providing the infrastructure to
deliver the information as efficiently as possible.
