A new paper from Brookings Institution fellow Niam Yaraghi examines why it’s so hard to measure the benefits of the government’s half-billion-dollar investment in health information exchange.
He finds continuing promise in effective data exchange, though he notes that establishing such organizations has been a rocky road for many despite the $548 million in federal grants awarded to states and other groups.
“After more than a decade of concerted national efforts, we are now on the verge of realizing the returns on our investments on health IT,” Yaraghi says. “HIE platforms have the potential to leverage the national investments on interoperability and radically improve the efficiency of healthcare services.”
He points to two conditions for successful regional health information organizations (RHIOs): the volume of available medical data and the extent to which its members access the available data.
Research from HEALTHeLINK, the RHIO of Western New York, attempts to address these issues. Two identical trials were conducted in two emergency department settings from Aug. 4-Sept. 26, 2014 and Oct. 20-Dec. 8, 2014, to assess the effects of querying the database of an HIE platform on the number of orders for laboratory tests and radiology examinations.
A group of medical liaisons accessed the RHIO and presented relevant information to the ED physicians. Those patient records then were compared with records of patients treated by the same physicians when the liaisons were not present.
In the first ED setting, researchers found a 25 percent reduction in lab tests and 26 percent fewer radiology examinations ordered when using the RHIO database. In the second ED setting, querying the RHIO’s database was associated with a 47 percent reduction in the estimated number of radiology examinations.
Yaraghi says studies on the effectiveness of RHIOs have mostly occurred during the early development stages of these platforms when few providers have joined; to that end, there has been little data available in the databases.
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