Using Health Information Exchange to Improve Public Health Essay

Using Health Information Exchange to Improve Public Health
Public Health depend on the reports submitted by health care providers. Information Technology generates these health related reports efficiently and accurately. Transferring of records electronically for generation of public health reports requires the health care providers to use information in a simple format, and follow the standards that are required by the public health agencies. Nevertheless, the development of electronic health systems with complex interfaces is too costly. As a result, the collecting of electronic records has not been fully implemented for the purpose of public health electronic reporting.
Today, Health Information Organizations around the world created systems to allow transferring of health information among different organizations in different locations. The United States government gives full support in the implementation of Health Information Technology infrastructure.
The Health information exchange uses public health as an advantage. Public health can be enhanced since Health Information Exchange has not been so far defined widely. Reporting of laboratory diagnoses can be compulsory. Paper based laboratory reports can be too expensive to produce. Automated laboratory reports have proven its efficiency and accuracy in generating reports but health care facilities are too slow to embrace the transition from manual to automated generation of reports. Laboratory data reporting can also be non-mandatory. In the law, not all communicable diseases need to be recorded. As these situations will not involve action on a specific individual, but as information to the public regarding the disease outbreaks.
Physician-based diagnoses reports can be required by law. Automated laboratory reports do not include the reports from physicians. Clinical information should be recorded and reported separately. Clinical data reports can be non-mandatory. Most surveillance systems are only monitoring data from current information which are not necessarily worth reporting and indicative.
The HIO needs to have a mechanism for assessing public health access for the purpose of public health investigation which is usually required by law. Public health departments are rightly authorized for health care delivery in certain circumstances and situations. Even if the total quality of preventive care is recognized to be poor, monitoring the quality of care depend on the chart reviews and analysis of different population levels. When mass casualty incidents happen, it is overwhelming for hospitals to cater requests of information for family members who are assumed missing, wounded, or dead. Presently, there are no existing effective system for disseminating such information across health organizations. Call centers should be available for queries in times of emergency. Health Information Exchange may also develop a clinical data exchange query functions to providers in case of disaster medical response. Alerting Public health in patient level and population level allows targeted communication or gateway to provide information that might be the concern of providers.
The extensive goal of the organizational and technical infrastructure of the HIOs will improve the effectiveness and quality of public health reporting, simplify health investigation, enhancement in responding emergency situation, and allow public health to communicate and transfer data to health care organizations.