After graduation, you desire to find a position working in Health Informatics. Your search for a Pro. Question
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After graduation, you desire to find a position working in Health Informatics. Your search for a Professional Practicum site landed you an opportunity to observe a Health IT Analyst at Lutheran Hospital who is assigned to implement an HIE with St. John’s Medical Center located in a nearby suburb.
The rationale for the HIE venture with St. John’s is because they share a patient population due to the different services each facility offers. This sharing of patients results in numerous patient encounters at both facilities for different reasons. The impetus for the HIE initiative resulted from patient satisfaction surveys that indicated there was dissatisfaction with manually obtaining copies of medical records when going from one provider to another to keep their providers apprised of their medical treatments.
Although there was a pressing need for the two facilities to exchange information electronically, there were also concerns expressed by the Health Information Management teams at both facilities.
Concerns:
Both hospitals have issues with their Master Patient Index (MPI), containing a large volume of duplicate medical record numbers requiring remediation.
St. John’s utilizes a voice recognition (VR) system for history and physical dictation and discharge summaries by the Hospitalists. Documents generated by the VR will not flow through the HIE.
Lutheran Hospital has a behavioral health unit that treats drug and alcohol abuse patients. Those encounters will be exempt from the HIE exchange.
For the HIE to exchange patient information, both facilities must have the patient registered in their MPI.
Patients have a right to opt out of the HIE Exchange.
Questions:
1) What are the benefits of having patient information exchanged between the two facilities when patients are treated at either facility?
2) Given the concern over the duplicate medical record numbers in each MPI, what risks are there when exchanged information is attached to a wrong patient?
3) What is the risk of the inconsistent exchange of information available for a provider gathering the previous history of information? Due to the rules of transfer, e.g., patients must be registered at both facilities, HPs and Discharge Summaries dictated by the Hospitalists will not flow through the HIE, and patients have a right to opt-out.
4) What is the risk if a patient treated for drug or alcohol abuse also has medical or surgical encounters in the system?
5) If you were a patient that frequented both facilities, how would you feel about having your patient information transferred between facilities automatically without your express consent?
SCIENCE
HEALTH SCIENCE
NURSING
HIM 2945
After graduation, you desire to find a position working in Health Informatics. Your search for a Pro
