A recent report from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) revealed that only 34 percent of hospitals nationwide have implemented health information exchanges (HIE) to date. HIEs are designed to facilitate access to health care data across several platforms and between different providers. The ONC’s report does show, however, that HIE adoption is growing steadily.

In 2013, 62 percent of hospitals exchanged information electronically with outside doctors, 57 percent did so with ambulatory health care providers and 40 percent with other hospitals. Those percentages are up significantly from 2006, when they stood at just 41, 36 and 15 percent respectively. At the primary administrative level, 15 states have established their own HIEs, while six others have reached hybrid partnership agreements with the federal government.

The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) outlined some of the benefits that hospitals stand to gain from adopting HIEs, including:

• Better and more efficient health care, since they will have access to patients’ complete health records
• Ability to, in turn, distribute information to patients’ doctors
• Improved community outreach capabilities
• Greater wealth of information to deal with shifting landscapes, including those pertaining to reimbursement models

The extract, transform, load (ETL) process is essential for the adoption of HIEs. Establishing an exchange at a hospital involves processing a great deal of data from a wide variety of sources. This information then has to be converted to a single format so that it can exist on a new system and be easily accessible. Data management services providers can supply the necessary ETL development tools to carry out this conversion, which can have very positive consequences for an entire community.