While most health systems are connected with HIT solutions, many clinicians are not making full use of data exchanges, according to a recent Computerworld article on the current state of health data interoperability.

For example, the article highlighted how Yale New Haven Health is connected to the Connie HIE, as well as CommonWell, Care Everywhere, and a few smaller, proprietary vendor repositories. This makes remote patient EHR data more accessible. However, there are still challenges in utilizing all external data, according to the article.

The main reason for this lack of utilization is that while the technology is in place, providers don’t know about it. The article goes onto discuss how providers don’t even know that there’s a “button to push” to enable data exchange. Micky Tripathi, national coordinator for health IT at the ONC, is quoted in the article calling this a “last mile” issue and that front-line staff need to move away from using paper and fax.

There’s also the issue of Clinical Care Documents (CCDs) being cluttered and many providers don’t trust that the patient information in the CCDs is complete or accurate.

In order to overcome this challenge, care organizations need solutions that don’t require 6 months of training to have staff fully utilize them. In addition, the health data exchange technology needs to be more simplified for easier use.

For example, RosettaHealth’s HealthBus solution is a SaaS-based data transport platform that normalizes and transports health events and records (EHRs) at scale across a variety of organizations such as hospitals, HIEs, and urgent and acute care systems. The platform allows for health data exchange over wide geographic areas at a fraction of the cost and effort of traditional methods.

The solution opens up a world of possibility to hospitals, urgent and post-acute care systems, and ambulatory practices for use with any health information tools, not just EHRs approved components. It’s also easier to share clinical information with any system in any community – with one connection per system.

Nobody said that true health data exchange was easy – as highlighted in this recent Computerworld article. However, with more simplified solutions that require minimal end-user training, ubiquitous health data exchange is truly possible.

    RosettaHealth can assist with any health information challenges you might have, book a free consultation with one of our interoperability experts.