Methods of Data Exchange in Healthcare

Jane Sarasohn-Kahn has a great chart on her Health Populi blog which shows how healthcare shares health data:
Healthcare Data Sharing Methods and Options

The chart is great even if the results are pretty awful. Plus, the data is a little dated. I wonder how those numbers have changed since early 2015.

Amazing that the top 3 forms of data exchange in healthcare were old analogue technologies: paper, information (phone), and fax.

This will come as no surprise to anyone in healthcare. I do find it interesting that the 4th most popular method is scanning the documents directly to the provider. That illustrates that most clinics would love to have an electronic option for sharing data, but there’s not an easier way. The options that are currently available are too hard. If they were easier, then I believe almost every practice would adopt them.

With all the benefits of direct exchanges, HIE, portals, Direct, FHIR, etc, it’s amazing that a simple document scan sent directly to a clinic is more popular. It makes me take a step back and wonder if we’ve over complicated the process of health data exchange.

Would the best option be to step back and make exchange much easier? Could we strip out all the extra features that are nice but impede participation from so many?

I can’t wait for the day that my health data is available wherever it’s needed. The first step to that reality might be taking a step back and simplifying the exchange of data.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • John,

    I recently had some basic tests in a major lab, with the results available on their portal. I checked the EPIC portal for my doctor (a major institution) and found nothing; a nurse told me that they have absolutely no way to take info from an outside lab and put it into EPIC. They can’t even type it! To say that this is scary… I wonder how my doctor gets to see it.

    I have trouble comprehending how this can be so difficult between an EPIC system and one of the larger lab companies out there.

    Ron

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