An efficient health information exchange (HIE) promptly and securely sends data about the patient to the physician and care team, regardless of where treatment or services were given. According to a nationally representative study done by Pew Charitable Trusts, federal health IT legislation maybe hampering EHR data exchange, which is desired by most consumers who want more access to personal health information and advocate improved provider-to-provider data sharing.
- Survey: More than eight out of ten individuals (81 percent) said they support more patient and provider access to health data. Many of these respondents also advocated for more measures to ensure the security of their data. According to the study, most individuals, regardless of a political party, support more federal steps to ensure the accuracy of patient data exchange (82 percent of Democrats, 66 percent of independents, and 51 percent of Republicans).
- Accessibility: About 4 in 10 survey respondents reported that the pandemic made them more apt to support provider-to-provider data exchange efforts, as well as patient access to personal health information through apps on smartphones and other devices. Additionally, more than two-thirds of respondents called for provider-to-provider EHR data exchange to include information that is currently not required by federal data exchange policies, such as images, advanced care plans, end-of-life preferences, and family medical histories.
- Valuable information: The brief suggested that the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) include more data, such as images and social determinants of health, in the United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI). Including this data could increase patient and provider access to this valuable information through the application programming interfaces (API), Pew suggested.
- Gaps: The survey revealed that two-thirds of respondents are comfortable with their providers scanning patient fingerprints or assigning individuals a unique code to improve patient matching across disparate EHR systems. These results reveal gaps in health IT policy that may be holding EHR systems back from their true potential.
- Privacy: To address patient privacy concerns, the brief called for Congress and the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) to work together to ensure that patient data is protected. In terms of improving patient matching, the researchers suggested that Congress and HHS investigate whether the long-standing ban on a patient identifier should be removed. ONC should also consider how biometrics could be leveraged to address patient matching deficiencies.
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