Hospitals That Share Patients Don’t Share Patient Data

If anyone in healthcare needs to catch up on your records, it’s another provider who is treating mutual patients. In this day and age, there’s no good reason why clinicians at one hospital should be guessing what the other would get (or not get as the case is far too often).

Over the last few years, we’ve certainly seen signs of data sharing progress. For example, in early August the marriage between health data sharing networks CommonWell and Carequality was consummated, with providers using Cerner and Greenway Health going live with their connections.

Still, health data exchange is far more difficult than it should be. Despite many years of trying, hospitals still don’t share data with each other routinely, even when they’re treating the same patient.

To learn more about this issue, researchers surveyed pairs of hospitals likely to share patients across the United States. The teams chose pairs which referred the largest volume of patients to each other in a given hospital referral region.

After reaching out to many facilities, the researchers ended up with 63 pairs of hospitals. Researchers then asked them how likely they were to share patient health information with nearby institutions with whom they share patients.

The results, which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, suggest that while virtually all of the hospitals they studied could be classified as routinely sharing data by federal definitions, that didn’t tell the whole story.

For one thing, while 97% of respondents met the federal guidelines, only 63% shared data routinely with hospitals with the highest shared patient (HSP) volume.

In fact, 23% of respondents reported that information sharing with their HSP hospital was worse than with other hospitals, and 48% said there was no difference. Just 17% said they enjoyed better sharing of patient health data with their HSP volume hospital.

It’s not clear how to fix the problem highlighted in the JAMIA study. While HIEs have been lumbering along for well more than a decade, only a few regional players seem to have developed a trusted relationship with the providers in their area.

The techniques HIEs use to foster such loyalty, which include high-touch methods such as personal check-ins with end users, don’t seem to work as well for some HIE they do for others. Not only that, HIE funding models still vary, which can have a meaningful impact on how successful they’ll be overall.

Regardless, it would be churlish to gloss over the fact that almost two-thirds of hospitals are getting the right data to their peers. I don’t know about you, but this seems like a hopeful development.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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