The benefits of health information exchange: an updated systematic review

Abstract

The current systematic review found that studies with more rigorous designs all reported benefits from HIE. Such benefits include fewer duplicated procedures, reduced imaging, lower costs, and improved patient safety. We also found that studies evaluating community HIEs were more likely to find benefits than studies that evaluated enterprise HIEs or vendor-mediated exchanges. Overall, these finding bode well for the HIEs ability to deliver on anticipated improvements in care delivery and reduction in costs.

The associations between query‐based and directed health information exchange with potentially avoidable use of health care services

“…The moderate negative association between query‐based exchange adoption and ACSHs and unplanned readmissions is consistent with positive benefits from HIE reported in the literature . This negative association may be a product of query‐based exchange's broad and longitudinal information sources, which might be more supportive of ongoing patient care and resource utilization decisions through more precise querying of available information.…”

“…Moreover, our ambulatory care focused study may not be generalizable to other settings of care. However, our findings fill a gap in the growing evidence base as the bulk of studies supporting the effectiveness of HIE as an intervention comes from ED settings . Regardless of generalizability limitations, this study provides the first evidence comparing the effect of directed and query‐based HIE.…”

“…First, the generalizability of these findings may be limited given that the study includes only one health information organization provider. Limited generalizability is a longstanding challenge in HIE research due to the selection issues associated with the significant organizational adoption costs, differences in technology, and varying levels of effort maturity and participation . For example, specific technical features in this study may be very different than in other settings.…”

Leading collective action to address wicked problems

“…Health information exchanges (HIEs) have emerged in recent decades as a potential means to address the quality‐expense challenge (Menachemi, Rahurkar, Harle, & Vest, ; Vest & Gamm, ). HIEs are the infrastructure for sharing electronic health records among health care stakeholders (Dixon, ).…”

Breakdowns on the information highway during inter-hospital patient transfers

“…A more recent systematic review is encouraging, but results were still mixed. 12 How could this be? If having information about our patients is good, why have HIEs not proven beneficial?…”