Role of health information exchange in improving patient safety

Introduction

Patient safety is one of the most intriguing potential benefits of health information exchange (HIE). Healthcare is an information-intensive environment that necessitates a plethora of data sources to make even the most basic healthcare decisions. If critical information is not readily available to the appropriate person at the appropriate time, errors of commission and omission may jeopardise patient safety.
By giving a more full clinical picture of a patient, an expanded, technology-enabled HIE would improve patient safety. There is already a substantial body of evidence demonstrating that HIE can improve patient safety across a variety of domains; nevertheless, robust HIE is only occurring in a small number of institutions and at a very low rate of occurrence. However, even in the absence of interoperability, health information technology (HIT) has the potential to significantly increase patient safety; however, HIE is predicted to significantly increase the value of HIT.

According to Kaelber et al. (2004), health information technology can improve patient safety and maintain improved health outcomes in six distinct ways.

Medication and prescription information:

Advanced medication and prescription information processing have been thoroughly explored in terms of patient information security. According to Lazarou et al. (1998), approximately 100,000 individuals die each year in the United States as a result of Adverse Drug Events (ADEs), which include both inevitable and preventable adverse events. According to Kaelber et al. (2004), the effect of HIE on pharmacological information processing is dependent on five distinct types of information processing. They include the processing of information about pharmaceutical allergies, the dose, the diagnosis association, and the genetic impact.

Verifying a patient’s drug allergies before to prescribing a treatment is what drug-allergy information processing entails. To begin, it is necessary to document any existing drug allergies in the patient and to identify any possible drug allergies in order to improve HIE.

The processing of drug-dose information in the HIE improves patient safety by ensuring that the daily dose, individual dose, and cumulative dose do not cause toxicity during therapy. Consider patient-specific statistics, such as age in the case of geriatric dosing, weight in the case of paediatric dosing, and creatinine clearance in the case of renal dosing.

The processing of drug-drug information falls into three categories: adding medicines to the patient’s existing prescriptions and their associated side effects, screening for duplicate pharmacological classes, and adding one.

Laboratory results

Patient safety is enhanced when HIE is used to improve laboratory information processing. It primarily assists in ensuring that prescribed laboratory testing is ordered and that test results, particularly abnormal laboratory results, are appropriately followed up. HIE is critical in this strategy because it will involve a few in-office tests, some send-out tests, and numerous independent laboratories. Laboratory information processing enhances patient safety by testing reports of medicine administration prior to and following the medication’s initial administration. Examples include cholesterol measurements, blood glucose levels, urine tests, and stool culture testing.

Information pertaining to radiology

When a physician or surgeon requests a radiological image, the patient is forwarded to another professional for interpretation. As a result, health information must be transferred between the two health specialists in order for the radiological exam to be ordered and reviewed efficiently. Patient safety can be enhanced using HIE in two areas of radiological information processing. Improved HIE, for example, may help reduce undesirable side effects and needless radiation dose in radiation therapy patients.

The provider’s interaction with the patient

The HIE is critical for communication and information sharing between primary care physicians and subspecialists who treat a variety of medical conditions. Effective information exchange is crucial for clinical decision-making and achieving favourable health outcomes. Following the introduction of CPOE systems, physicians and hospitals must keep track of both new errors generated by the systems and errors prevented by the systems.

Patient-provider information exchange

HIEs can help ensure the security of patient information in a variety of ways, including enhanced communication between patients and health care providers. HIE enables individuals to check their medical histories for inaccuracies, contribute essential information to their medical records, monitor test results, analyse drugs, and quickly connect with healthcare practitioners when they fear their safety is at risk. Additionally, personal health records (PHRs) enable doctors to more quickly access and communicate accurate information to their patients, hence improving patient safety by providing the appropriate information at the appropriate time.

Information on public health

Public health information processing include the processing of health reports and statistics at the community level, as well as the collection of health data in a variety of health disciplines. To increase patient safety, information is sent from one department to the next, from the institutional level to the level of government authorities. Public health data are routinely collected, compared, and reported in order to improve health outcomes.

Conclusion

With the digitization of additional health care information, the potential for HIE to improve patient safety grows, and it is currently rather substantial. One challenge will be building healthcare systems capable of processing and utilising the massive increase in data. Only then will we be able to realise the potential for increased patient safety associated with enhanced HIE, because we will have increased the percentage of time that the appropriate information is sent to the appropriate person at the appropriate time, allowing for the appropriate healthcare decision to be made. It was showed how to optimise medicine processing by utilising allergy, drug-drug, diagnosis, dose, and gene information. While HIE systems such as CPOE are beneficial for information processing and data transformation, saving time and materials, lowering health care costs, and improving patient safety, Koppel et al. (2005) discovered that while CPOE implementation demonstrated error elimination, it introduced new challenges of medical errors endangering patient safety, necessitating the attention of physicians and health care professionals.

References

1. Kaelber, D. C., & Bates, D. W. (2007). Health information exchange and patient safety. Journal of biomedical informatics, 40(6), S40-S45.
2. Lazarou, J., Pomeranz, B. H., & Corey, P. N. (1998). Incidence of adverse drug reactions in hospitalized patients: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Jama, 279(15), 1200-1205.
3. Koppel, R., Metlay, J. P., Cohen, A., Abaluck, B., Localio, A. R., Kimmel, S. E., & Strom, B. L. (2005). Role of computerized physician order entry systems in facilitating medication errors. Jama, 293(10), 1197-1203.
4. Chinta, B. K. R. The Role of Health Information Exchange in Improving Patient Safety: A Literature Review.