Health Information Exchange (HIE) Support Services

There has never been a better time to connect to a Health Information Exchange (HIE). HIEs are more important now than ever. HIEs allow your practice to access medical records from care your patients may have received from unaffiliated emergency departments or hospitals. Due to the impacts of COVID, people have been more likely to receive care at facilities far removed from their primary care provider. This means that the local provider may not have ready access to vital patient information. With almost 100% of Kansas hospitals reporting data to an HIE, this data can be accessed easily if the primary provider is also connected to an HIE. See below for the top five reasons your practice should connect to an HIE and how KFMC can help you optimize your HIE connection.

Top Five Reasons to Connect to an HIE

1. Save staff time spent calling and requesting records. Just log into the HIE and retrieve those records!
2. Improve continuity of care and patient outcomes. Use the HIE to retrieve records of new patients and save your provider time during the office visit.
3. Reduce duplicative testing and procedures. Access test results from other providers through the HIE instead of repeating them.
4. Ability to see patient information from hospitals in neighboring states. The HIEs listed in below have access to hospital data from neighboring states.
5. Support and improve MIPS scores in Promoting Interoperability. In 2022, you can receive 40 points for the “Health Information Bi-Directional Exchange,” which is an alternative to the existing two Health Information Exchange measures.

How KFMC Can Help Your Practice

The top three reasons practices report they are not connected to an HIE are staffing constraints, technology limitations and financial concerns. KFMC can help you with the staffing constraints and technology limitations.

Our Health Information Technology consultants can serve as a liaison between your practice and the HIE to support your practice in making the connection to the HIE. If you don’t have dedicated IT staff, this support will be critical in a successful HIE connection.

KFMC can also help you to optimize the HIE after integration. Our Practice Transformation consultants can work with your staff to develop workflows to support use of data from the HIE. We can evaluate how your practice can use HIE data in patient care, and assist your practice in retrieving that data and integrating it into the patient record in an efficient manner. In addition, we can help your staff identify how to use HIE data to close care gaps and satisfy quality measures. These workflows and additional patient data will save staff time in the long run.

If you are interested in connecting to an HIE, or are already connected but don’t feel like you are getting the maximum benefit from the HIE, please contact us and we will be happy to assist you!