SmileMDs argument against dealing directly with Healthcare Information Exchanges (HIE) and/or your local Healthcare IT provider. How would society behave if it had no rules, multiple persons claiming they were “king of the hill”, and no one taking accountability? This would lead to those who’ve assumed power to take it away from those who are paralyzed with fear, uncertainty, frustration, and a la
ck of direction. This is the state of the electronic Healthcare Information Exchange environment in the United States, with regulations, rules and guidelines,
HIE’s have sprung up as for-profit, not-for-profit and public sector-run entities each claiming to have the foothold for electronic health records (EHR) and the best way for medical practices, clinics and hospitals to move towards this new brave frontier. Is your facility to partner with the local HIE, your county HIE, state HIE, organizational HIE, or wait for the federal programs to be in place? How do you know if your EHR partner is actively integrating with all of the upstream HIE’s? How are you assured that any data uploaded to the system is valid and not corrupted? What happens if your patient has a medical issue in a different state, or in a different country? How will the promise of your local HIE respond? Your practice or hospital relies on technology to run, serve, and finance daily operations. HIE is only a small percentage of the data needed to operate, and in actually that data is NEVER used directly by you or your team anyway, but it sure is expensive to produce. These records have nothing or little to do with the company that supports your printers, the other vendor teams supporting your phone systems at each location, servers at each location, network at each location, backups at each location, HIPAA compliancy, and so on. So many parts, so many people, and now that it’s all inter-connected who do you call when there is a problem? This is where the promise of managed services, cloud computing and everywhere access has failed the medical field. The insecurity of investing capital dollars that cost twice the rate to borrow, more than 3 years ago, into a fledgling records environment, while hoping that the government bureaucracy actually pays that part of your investment back, somewhere near to when it promised, is enough to cause anyone consternation.
