The health information exchange landscape is evolving, transitioning from essential data providers to proactive advocates for community health and strengthening the public health infrastructure. Beyond traditional healthcare roles, Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are recognized as critical partners in comprehensive health data and analytics networks, facilitating the safe sharing of health information for various purposes. Seen as an indispensable public resource, HIEs are poised to further enhance population health outcomes. Learn how.
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) play a critical role in enabling population health initiatives by facilitating the seamless exchange of clinical data across healthcare organizations. This interconnected system allows for a more comprehensive view of public health information, enabling providers and regulatory bodies to analyze trends, identify high-risk populations, and tailor interventions to address targeted community health needs.
Their role in securely exchanging health data for diverse applications is likened to that of a vital public utility, with an expanding number of stakeholders recognizing their far-reaching benefits.
HIEs serve 92 percent of Americans, delivering more than one billion clinical alerts annually, according to Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative (SHIEC) survey data. In addition, 89 percent of providers believe HIEs help facilitate improved care quality.
There is growing recognition as to how these organizations actively contribute to public health efforts by enabling officials to monitor disease patterns and outbreaks. However, their role extends beyond emergency response as HIEs are instrumental in driving value-based care transformation initiatives nationwide.
Truly, HIEs have evolved into an essential component of the healthcare system by acting as a secure conduit for exchanging patient data. Yet, HIEs are also being called to adjust to the current demand, as stakeholders are urgently focused on achieving improved population health management. With advancements in healthcare technology and an increasing volume of digital health records, conventional methods to share clinical data may no longer suffice; they present challenges related to interoperability, security, and scalability.
Fortunately, the ongoing shift towards value-based care and rapid technological advancements in healthcare present opportunities for HIEs to showcase their unique value. HIEs must deliver unified and reliable data analytics by leveraging scalable technology infrastructure and innovation to remain viable and maintain high-quality data.
Initiating this work begins by implementing a data quality improvement strategy. This also serves as a means for HIEs to safeguard and expand their market presence. When formulating a data quality improvement strategy, HIEs should consider the following:
Adhering to these standards better positions HIEs to support industry data connectivity efforts at the state and federal levels by providing secure, high-quality, and accurate data, leading to improved patient care and safety.
Moreover, teaming up with a Certified Data Partner can provide an efficient way to simplify the data aggregation complexity and validate data streams, resulting in faster value delivery no matter where an organization is in its level of data aggregation and transformation. Accordingly, an NCQA DAV Certified Data Partner like Ninja Universe™ by Health Catalyst™ can extend the highly-regarded designation to HIEs.
DAV data is highly valuable to health plans and providers as it eliminates the need for primary source verification (PSV), thereby saving time and resources required for data validation and compliance with quality reporting guidelines. Providing validated data to health plans provides significant value when evaluating the return on investment for HIE services.
For example, by adopting Ninja Universe™, WISHIN became one of the first HIEs in the nation to achieve NCQA DAV status. The Ninja Universe platform comprises modular components that cater to WISHIN’s diverse data needs and quality use cases. With over 40 ingestion sites and NCQA validation, WISHIN has enhanced the value of its data for its health plan participants, resulting in the following positive outcomes:
The importance of health information exchanges cannot be overstated. With providers, health systems, and public health officials relying on insights from extensive data sets, these exchanges play a crucial role in helping them address pressing public health issues and the industry’s continual shift toward value-based care models and more robust population health management.
The question arises: can HIEs remain relevant in this time of significant change? The answer lies in their ability to offer comprehensive and compelling data, expand their extensive experience managing diverse data sources, and standardize vast data using a unified data capture model. To be sure, these capabilities, when done with fidelity, will only serve to solidify their position in the ever-evolving healthcare data and analytics ecosystem.
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Population Health Success: Three Ways to Leverage Data