Why Does the Rio Grande Valley Need a Health Information Exchange?
Medicine has come a long way in the past few decades. Today’s doctors and nurses have some amazing tools at their disposal: the latest high tech equipment, modern pharmaceuticals and procedures. Yet, in many cases the most important tool a medical professional needs is INFORMATION. Information about you, the patient. What are your allergies? Lab results? Past procedures? What medicines are you taking? Correct and up-to-the-minute information about a patient’s history is a vital part of treatment. And yet for many, access to this most important and vital tool still lingers in the dark ages. Scattered around filing systems in different offices. Subject to retrieval by hand, accessible only by phone or fax. There’s a better way. It’s called health information exchange.
With health information exchange your medical records are available electronically to your participating doctors and caregivers instantly – right when they need them. The advantage of an electronic health record is that all your information is in one place.
Health information exchange, or HIE, is a method to electronically move patients’ health and medical information–in a secure, HIPAA-compliant way–between doctors, hospitals and other healthcare providers when it is needed for patient care. Secure HIE allows patients and physicians to make sure that health information is available when and where it is needed, improving care coordination and quality while reducing costs and treatment delays.
