< + > The Role of Health Information Management in Improving the Accuracy and Accessibility of Patient Information Across Different Healthcare Systems

Sharing really is caring, especially in healthcare. Quality data is necessary to make sound decisions that better your organization and the lives of your staff and patients. However, quality data is hard to get in the quantitative measurements you need when you only have access to your own data. The immediate solution to this is for different healthcare organizations to share their data — benefitting everyone as they now have the data they all need. The concept is simple but in reality, data sharing comes with complications. For example, how can you ensure the data wasn’t changed or corrupted during the transfer? How do you share your data if your system isn’t compatible with another organization’s system?

In search of clarification on these complications, we reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask — what role does health information management play in improving the accuracy and accessibility of patient information across different healthcare systems? The following are their answers.

Liz Lewis, Director of Product at CommonWell Health Alliance
Health information management plays a vital role not only in improving the accuracy and accessibility of patient information across healthcare systems but also across systems and organizations across the nation. As interoperability continues to take hold, health information management leaders help ensure that the information shared through data exchanges and networks is aligned to Master Patient Index (MPI) technologies, which are critical to streamlining and automating patient matching to a very high degree of certainty. When coupled with a record locator service (RLS), accessing patient information across different healthcare systems becomes much easier and contributes to a future in which essential patient information is accurate, secure, and accessible to providers anywhere a patient seeks care.

Megan Pruente, MPH, RHIA, Vice President of Business Development & Industry Relations at Harris Data Integrity Solutions
A critical role of HIM professionals is managing the accuracy and accessibility of patient data across multiple systems, which begins with accurate patient identification. To ensure data integrity, HIM teams play a vital role in managing the EMPI (enterprise master patient index), a tool used to link patient records across different care settings within a healthcare system. Accurate patient identification is essential for ensuring that health data follows the patient across the continuum of care, which reduces medical errors, duplicate records, and inefficiencies. Duplicate records are a significant issue that arises from inconsistent or incorrect patient data capture, such as variations in name, date of birth, or other demographics. HIM professionals are responsible for establishing standardized data capture practices and training staff to ensure these standards are maintained.

HIM professionals also work to ensure that patient records are complete and accessible by overseeing the MPI, setting best practices for patient matching, and managing algorithm performance. Best practices in EMPI management include:

• Standardizing Data Entry: Ensuring data is captured uniformly, often by mirroring government-issued identification, to reduce variations
• Utilizing Advanced Matching Algorithms: Employing deterministic, rules-based, and probabilistic algorithms to improve matching accuracy
• Implementing Feedback Loops: Encouraging staff to report duplicate records when they’re identified and providing continuous training on patient search and data entry best practices

By ensuring the integrity of the EMPI, HIM professionals help facilitate seamless information sharing across systems, which is crucial for improving care coordination, especially in large, multi-facility health systems. As the healthcare industry moves toward greater interoperability, HIM plays a central role in maintaining data integrity, ensuring that accurate patient information is available whenever and wherever it’s needed across the continuum of care.

Mary Kuchenbrod, VP of Data Operations at Arcadia
Data is the currency that enables organizations to deliver high-quality care efficiently. Therefore, healthcare organizations must use advanced healthcare information management approaches and tools to streamline the entire data lifecycle, from collection to storage to sharing to analysis. By simplifying the data integration process and ensuring organizations have their data on a single platform, healthcare organizations can more easily access and share data across healthcare organizations.

A key component of health information management is maintaining data hygiene and reducing data disruptions. Organizations must collect and manage massive amounts of complex patient data across multiple, fragmented sources, and sometimes organizations unintentionally take in low-quality, broken data. This can significantly impact an organization by disrupting workflows, skewing performance measurement, and misguiding actions. Bad data can also undermine provider trust, hindering providers’ willingness to adopt and use data-driven technology. Healthcare organizations must take a proactive approach to health information management and leverage healthcare data platforms that can utilize advanced analytics and technologies, including AI, to improve data accuracy. For instance, I have coined a concept called ‘data seatbelts,’ which serve as a series of checkpoints that proactively catch bad data, quarantine that data for cleansing, and help ensure only clean, high-quality data makes it into the system.

Angela Rose, MHA, RHIA, CHPS, FAHIMA, Vice President, Client Success at MRO
Health Information Management (HIM) professionals oversee the accuracy and accessibility of patient information throughout the healthcare ecosystem. This includes patients, providers, payers, and other requestors. HIM professionals work to ensure patient data is complete, correct, and available to the right individuals at the right time. They also safeguard patient privacy and regulatory compliance. It’s a tall order and an essential role in healthcare.

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has supported these professionals for nearly 100 years. At the association’s recent National Conference in Salt Lake City, several new responsibilities emerged.

• Collaborate across multidisciplinary teams to establish policies and workflows that govern how digital information is stored, accessed, and transferred
• Ensure patient data is managed efficiently and securely to meet new interoperability requirements
• Oversee patient information-sharing decisions and processes to safeguard both data integrity and patient privacy including minimum necessary
• Implement new AI, APIs, and other tools like OCR and NLP to automate tasks and move staff to more complex, higher-value work

HIM professionals should continuously educate themselves on nascent regulations and technologies to ensure patient privacy standards remain uncompromised. The integration of new tools also improves operational efficiency while supporting the quality of our nation’s health data.

Jeff Bennett, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Modivcare
Health information management plays a pivotal role in enhancing the accuracy and accessibility of patient information across healthcare systems. By leveraging data from multiple reliable sources, we can deliver a more holistic view of a patient’s health needs, allowing for tailored, efficient care that takes more than an episodic view into account. While the volume of available data can be overwhelming for healthcare systems – think survey data, readings from wearables and other home devices, and virtual and in-person healthcare interactions – having a systematic approach, or a partner who can provide a clinical lens and filter out the noise, is essential to a high functioning health information management system. This approach ensures patients receive the right intervention at the right time, and is imperative to improving outcomes as well as providing a positive experience across stakeholder groups, including providers, payers, patients, and family members.

Jonathan Shapland, Senior Director, Federal Health IT at Maximus
Health information management is the backbone of modern healthcare data systems. It forms the foundation for governing the timely, traceable, and accurate flow of health data. The professionals that manage the information – data analysts and health informaticists, for example – serve as architects of interoperability, using technology standards like FHIR to build bridges between islands of patient data. Together, these people, processes, and tools allow organizations to enforce data governance, standardize operations, and facilitate seamless data exchange across healthcare systems, resulting in reduced costs and improved outcomes.

Raj Gorla, Head of Healthcare Provider Practice at UST
Health Information Management (HIM) is critical for enhancing the accuracy and accessibility of patient data by ensuring it remains consistent, secure, and easily shareable across healthcare systems. Data quality, interoperability, and governance are key challenges in healthcare. Robust HIM policies and teams using standardized coding systems such as ICD-10 and CPT and applying standards like HL7, CCDA, and FHIR can address these challenges while improving care coordination, reducing medical errors, and improving patient outcomes. Implementing systems like ICD-10 and CPT ensures uniform, reliable health information for accurate diagnosis, treatment, and billing.

HIM professionals manage Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), using standards like HL7 and FHIR to enable seamless data sharing between healthcare providers. Regular audits and real-time validation systems maintain the accuracy and integrity of patient records. Governance establishes frameworks for data ownership, compliance, and legal requirements, ensuring ethical handling of patient data.

As for patient access, HIM professionals create secure patient portals, empowering individuals to view and manage their health information. HIM professionals work with IT teams to integrate EHR systems, reduce data silos, and implement technology that improves data management. HIM professionals ensure that healthcare staff is well-trained in data handling procedures and accurate documentation. They also leverage AI to automate tasks like medical coding, predictive analytics for patient outcomes, and blockchain for secure data sharing. Additionally, technologies like cloud computing, IoT, and robotic process automation (RPA) enhance data management and operational efficiency.

Deborah Mounts, Vice President of Engineering at Full Spectrum
The role of health information management is to optimize patient outcomes by connecting patient information from disparate sources. With the increase of specialized physicians leading to even more fragmented records, the role is to bring that data back together. Clinicians require access to a greater and greater range of patient data living in these disparate systems. And the challenge is clear – interoperability in the field of healthcare has not yet been realized. Most notably, health information systems do not follow the same integration and data interchange standards. This lack of interoperability reduces the quality of care provided to patients and increases the workload of healthcare professionals. Health information management will play a key role driving interoperability improvements.

Kamal Anand, Chief Product Officer at TeleVox
Health Information Management (HIM) is essential to improving the accuracy and accessibility of patient information across healthcare systems. By ensuring data is accurately recorded, standardized, and securely maintained, HIM professionals enable seamless information exchange between providers. Through proper coding practices, robust data governance, and interoperability initiatives, they help reduce errors and enhance care coordination. By integrating systems like electronic health records (EHRs) and patient relationship management platforms, HIM ensures real-time access to vital patient information for authorized users, leading to better clinical decision-making and improved patient outcomes.

Jason Z. Rose, CEO at Clearsense
With the increasing pace of mergers and acquisitions in healthcare, organizations are facing the challenge of managing massive volumes of legacy data that often sit dormant in outdated applications. These legacy systems are no longer actively used but still hold valuable clinical and operational information. Implementing a robust legacy data management strategy is crucial to unlock this data’s potential, but it can be a complex process without a clear plan and approach to create a permanent program.

Modern technology offers solutions that both provide a framework to execute application rationalization and provide support for ongoing governance. These advanced tools can effectively migrate legacy data and seamlessly integrate it with existing EHR systems to ensure clinicians can access this information in their daily workflows. This enables the creation of the long-coveted longitudinal patient record that is accessible across systems, allowing providers to view comprehensive patient histories in real-time, leading to more accurate diagnoses, improved continuity of care, and better coordination among healthcare teams. Beyond integration, modern data enablement platforms help validate data to ensure quality while also bolstering security to meet regulatory standards. By leveraging these evolving tools, CIOs and HIT professionals can not only help improve quality of care but also streamline operations and make a material impact on their organizations’ bottom line.

Etienne Boshoff, Managing Director and Lead Consultant at EHR Enhancify
Health Information Management (HIM) is pivotal in elevating patient information accuracy and accessibility across healthcare systems. By standardizing data formats, HIM ensures consistency and minimizes errors, which are critical for precise diagnoses and effective treatments. Through rigorous validation processes and advanced error detection technologies, HIM guarantees data integrity, providing clinicians with reliable information for sound decision-making. Moreover, HIM acts as a bridge across disparate systems, facilitating seamless information exchange using standards like HL7 and FHIR to enhance care coordination. Effective data governance safeguards patient privacy and ensures adherence to regulations such as HIPAA, reinforcing trust and compliance within the healthcare ecosystem.

There are a lot of great answers here! Huge thank you to Liz Lewis, Director of Product at CommonWell Health Alliance, Megan Pruente, MPH, RHIA, Vice President of Business Development & Industry Relations at Harris Data Integrity Solutions, Mary Kuchenbrod, VP of Data Operations at Arcadia, Angela Rose, MHA, RHIA, CHPS, FAHIMA, Vice President, Client Success at MRO, Jeff Bennett, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Modivcare, Jonathan Shapland, Senior Director, Federal Health IT at Maximus, Raj Gorla, Head of Healthcare Provider Practice at UST, Deborah Mounts, Vice President of Engineering at Full Spectrum, Kamal Anand, Chief Product Officer at TeleVox, Jason Z. Rose, CEO at Clearsense, and Etienne Boshoff, Managing Director and Lead Consultant at EHR Enhancify for taking the time out of your day to submit a quote! And thank you to all of you for taking the time out of your day to read this article! We could not do this without all of your support.

What role do you think health information management plays in improving the accuracy and accessibility of patient information across different healthcare systems? Let us know either in the comments down below or over on social media. We’d love to hear from all of you!