Electronic Health Records: Fast, Easy, Efficient. So why are less than 10 percent of doctors
using them?

By Karina Ioffee
May 17, 2009

The Brooklyn Health Information Exchange was included in a blog posted on the CUNY site. BHIX Executive Director, Irene Koch was asked to comment on what it means to be interoperable in a health information exchange environment.

Excerpts: Communication is at the heart of electronic health records and it continues to be a problem when doctors can’t access patient files generated somewhere else. To help break down these barriers, nonprofit organizations called health information exchanges work with hospitals, nursing homes and homecare providers to share information about patients’ medical histories, medications and past surgeries. They are so critical, that $2 billion of the federal stimulus package has been allocated to them.

One of these is the Brooklyn Health Information Exchange, BHIX, which connects hospitals, nursing homes, home care and senior living facilities so that they can share information about patients. “We believe that records need to be inter-operable to be meaningful,” says BHIX executive director Koch. “They have to be connected to the state health information network, so they’re not operating in a siloed, independent environment.”

To read the entire article, go to:
http://blogs.jounalism.cuny.edu/karinaioffee/2009/05/17