Access of ED to Health Information Exchange data can empower efficiency, quality

The quality and efficiency of care in hospital emergency departments (EDs) can be primarily improved when physicians utilize a health information exchange (HIE) to access other providers’ electronic medical records.

Improved access offers a more complete picture of a patient’s condition, in accordance to findings of a new study that analyzed the affect of health information exchange use in EDs. The study concentrated on lengths of stay, 30-day readmission rates, as well as the number of doctors required to examine patients.

Over a nineteen-month period, the study looked at nearly 86,000 encounters at 4 emergency departments that had the capability to access the HealthlinkNY HIE, connecting providers and sufferers in thirteen counties in the Hudson Valley, Catskills and Southern Tier of New York.

What researchers discovered was that access to patient data through the HIE decreased patient length of stay by 7%, reduced the odds of readmission by 4.5%, and lowered the number of consultations from multiple doctors by 12%.

“The outcomes of our study leave no doubt that health information exchange access improves quality of healthcare and operational efficiency,” stated study co-author Emre Demirezen, assistant professor of operations and supply chain management at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “While common sense tells us that access to the sufferer’s entire medical history would benefit both the sufferer and the healthcare provider, my co-authors and I’ve confirmed that it does by conducting one of the 1st empirical investigations into the benefits of health info exchange use at the individual patient level.”

“Now providers have the evidence they require making health information exchange use a priority for their organizations,” adds Christina Galanis, president and CEO of HealthLinkNY. “The study shows that New York State’s visionary investment in HIEs is actually paying off.”

Galanis points out that New York is the 1st large state in the nation to develop a public network of regional HIEs that are linked together through the Statewide Health Information Network of New York (SHIN-NY), enabling providers across the state to exchange patient information. HealthlinkNY is a Qualified Entity funded by the New York State Department of Health.

“We were one of the 1st HIEs in New York to establish our HIE based on a data warehouse,” she says, adding that HealthLinkNY serves as the region’s access point to SHIN-NY. “When providers need to query us, they can also query all the other HIEs in the state at the similar time. That is the new function that came out previous year, called statewide Patient Record Lookup.”

Galanis appreciates that at the time the research was conducted—covering more than 46,000 patient visits from the time period of July 1, 2012, to Jan. 31, 2014—the predecessor to HealthLinkNY had a total of five hospitals and was a small regional HIE. However, in late 2014, a merger between Southern Tier HealthLink in Binghamton and Taconic Health Information Network and Community in Fishkill, N.Y., formed HealthLinkNY, which serves 43 hospitals.

“Because we’ve so much data now, we can actually follow patients through the years,” claims Galanis, who points out that the researchers are interested in doing extra studies on the impact of HIE on patient- and provider-level outcomes. “What this study indicates is that providers not only had access to patient data, but they actually acted on it.”