Competitive fears slow growth of HIEs

While health information exchanges can have benefits for providers, many are uncomfortable sharing such data, as they fear that they could lose their competitive advantage. For that reason, many HIEs are still locked into basic record-keeping systems, rather than the richer information sharing clinicians would prefer. According to researchers at the Center for Studying Health System Change, HIEs are not evolving into high-end data management platforms that could help to improve quality as quickly as they could due to these concerns.

The Center drew these conclusions after looking at research conducted on four HIEs, including Cincinnati-based HealthBridge, the Tampa Bay Regional Health Information Organization, CareSpark, which serves sections of Tennessee and Virginia and Indiana HIE. The research looked at community stakeholders in the four HIEs. Researchers found that none of the HIEs had comprehensive clinical data systems, partly because providers were very anxious about the idea of building a clinical data repository.

Given provider concerns, CareSpark and the Tampa Bay HIE are now negotiating separate data-use agreements with providers, which prevent the HIEs from pulling data together. On the other hand, the other two HIEs--whose members had been involved longer--have agreed to collaborate on information exchange.

To learn more about this issue:
- read this Government Health IT article [1]