Health Information Exchange (HIE) Health, Medicine, Nursing Term Paper

Health Information Exchange
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation

Health Information Exchange
I. Introduction
Attention Getter: Many hospitals in the United States of America (USA) have implemented electronic health recording systems to facilitate health information exchange (HIE).
Credibility Statement: Although some people might be against HIE due to the privacy issues that might be involved, it enables pharmacists, physicians, and other health professionals to access and share patients’ information securely, which fosters patient safety and improve the quality of medical services (HealthIT.gov, 2020).
Thesis Statement: HIE facilitates fast information exchange among healthcare providers, which promotes high-quality medical services since it helps physicians to avoid medication errors, decrease duplicate testing, and improve disease diagnoses.
II. Body
1. Patient’s attitudes towards HIE.
The majority of patients are enthusiastic about HIE since they recognize its capacity to improving their safety and quality of healthcare services (Simon et al., 2009).
However, patients are concerned about the misuse of their medical profiles, which makes some of them have a negative attitude toward HIE.
The current policy safeguarding patients’ data stored and shared electronically prohibits physicians from using the data without owners’ consent.
2. Challenges and new strategies of HIE.
The primary challenges facing HIE include privacy and confidentiality issues.
Even though many patients have a positive attitude toward HIE, they fear that their medical data might be breached and exposed to the public since they do not understand how the databases are safeguarded from cybercriminals (Yeager et al., 2017).
Nevertheless, some of the new strategies suggest that patients’ actual data, such as physical addresses, names, email addresses, phone numbers, and date of birth, should be encrypted to add a security layer to it before storing such information on the cloud.
That way, even if the data is breached, no one can trace patients and humiliate them by publishing the data on the Internet.
3. HIE among USA hospitals.
The USA government has continually encouraged many hospitals to implement electronic health records to facilitate the effectiveness of HIE.
Physicians and health organizations support this move since they understand its significance in improving patient care and safety (Holmgren &...