A Look At Nursing Home Readiness For HIE Participation

A newly released study suggests that nursing homes have several steps to go through before they are ready to participate in health information exchanges. The study, which appeared in the AHIMA-backed Perspectives in Health Information Management, was designed to help researchers understand the challenges nursing homes faced in health information sharing, as well as what successes they had achieved to date.

As the study write up notes, the U.S. nursing home population is large — nearly 1.7 million residents spread across 15,600 nursing homes as of 2014. But unlike other settings that care for a high volume of patients, nursing homes haven’t been eligible for EMR incentive programs that might have helped them participate in HIEs.

Not surprisingly, this has left the homes at something of a disadvantage, with very few participating in networked health data sharing. And this is a problem in caring for residents adequately, as their care is complex, involving nurses, physicians, physicians’ offices, pharmacists and diagnostic testing services. So understanding what potential these homes have to connect is a worthwhile topic of study. That’s particularly the case given that little is known about HIE implementation and the value of shared patient records across multiple community-based settings, the study notes.

To conduct the study, researchers conducted interviews with 15 nursing home leaders representing 14 homes in the midwestern United States that participated in the Missouri Quality Improvement Initiative (MOQI) national demonstration project.  Studying MOQI participants helped researchers to achieve their goals, as one of the key technology goals of the CMS-backed project is to develop knowledge of HIE implementations across nursing homes and hospital boundaries and determine the value of such systems to users.

The researchers concluded that incorporating HIE technology into existing work processes would boost use and overall adoption. They also found that participation inside and outside of the facility, and providing employees with appropriate training and retraining, as well as getting others to use the HIE, would have a positive effect on health data sharing projects. Meanwhile, getting the HIE operational and putting policies for technology use were challenges on the table for these institutions.

Ultimately, the study concluded that nursing homes considering HIE adoption should look at three areas of concern before getting started.

  • One area was the home’s readiness to adopt technology. Without the right level of readiness to get started, any HIE project is likely to fail, and nursing home-based data exchanges are no exception. This would be particularly important to a project in a niche like this one, which never enjoyed the outside boost to the emergence of the technology culture which hospitals and doctors enjoyed under Meaningful Use.
  • Another area identified by researchers was the availability of technology resources. While the researchers didn’t specify whether they meant access to technology itself or the internal staff or consultants to execute the project, but both seem like important considerations in light of this study.
  • The final area researchers identified as critical for making a success of HIE adoption in nursing homes was the ability to match new clinical workflows to the work already getting done in the homes. This, of course, is important in any setting where leaders are considering major new technology initiatives.

Too often, discussions of health data sharing leave out major sectors of the healthcare economy like this one. It’s good to take a look at what full participation in health data sharing with nursing homes could mean for healthcare.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

2 Comments

  • Well taken points. Nursing homes are one of HIE’s most difficult challenges due to the length of stay, the great number of providers, etc. For example, the home may have its own medical staff while each resident may also have their own. Then there is the number of therapists, outside medical visits or procedures for each person.

  • Great points Carl. I hadn’t thought about some of the challenges that nursing homes face when it comes to sharing data and the number of providers that are involved in care. Definitely some unique challenges, but also why it’s so important that we figure it out.

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