“Electronic health information exchange (HIE) allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists, other health care providers and patients to appropriately access and securely share a patient’s vital medical information electronically—improving the speed, quality, safety and cost of patient care” (HealthIT, 2014). Health Information exchange is becoming important in the communication between providers to provide the best care possible to patients. Every state along with their hospitals has their own way of exchanging information between each other.
South Carolina’s health information exchange is called “SCHIEx” (AHIMA, 2010). “SCHIEx provides a state-level information infrastructure for connecting local healthcare providers and other stakeholders” (AHIMA,
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These participants include some health facilities. In Spartanburg, two facilities participate and they are South Carolina School of Deaf and Blind and Spartanburg Area Mental Health Center. Patients choose if they would like to participate. Recently, Georgia has combined with South Carolina to form a state to state information exchange. This connection allows providers to easily receive healthcare information from both states. SCHIEx is designed as a federated model. “SCHIEx minimizes the amount of information that will be managed centrally” (Bolisetty & Cassell, …show more content…
One example of a challenge with health information exchange is sustaining the health information exchange without government help (Markus, Matthews, & Tripathi, 2014). There is always the question of who should pay for what and how much. Another challenge is determining which governing structure should be used. A big challenge that many patients and physicians worry about is how safe sensitive information are and how to treat that information. Security should always be required when accessing patient records. Data use agreements and connections between HIE organizations are also a concern with health information exchange. “The types of healthcare partners that are needed is a challenge when determining the trading area needed for a viable HIE” (PHII, 2005).
Although there are challenges, there are opportunities with implementing a health information exchange system. One opportunity is HIE can improve reporting to public health and in return improve the health of the community. Another opportunity HIE have is that it can improve the communication between physicians and can lower the number of duplicate services and decrease the cost of services. Implementing health information exchange systems can overall help improve care for