An HL7 interface consultant can help you to achieve seamless interoperability.
That means your EHR, practice management, lab/radiology department, and billing systems will be connected. You will also be able to link up with regional and national health information exchanges to share patient information.
Interoperability is so essential now that the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health IT enacted a rule in 2020 to prevent the blocking of access to patient information.
With this law, your patients expect you to have access to their complete medical records. And when your physicians have them, they can make the best care decisions.
Working with an interoperability consultant will make it possible to meet the demands of your patients and physicians.
Here is a brief rundown of the benefits of working with a reputable HL7 interface consultant.
1. Reduce Administrative Costs
When your consultant helps you connect all your healthcare applications, your operating costs will drop.
Costs of manual data processing and faxing will drastically reduce.
Along with that, your team will commit fewer errors associated with manual data entry and transcription. Without proper information sharing, clinicians and administrators must manually extract information from faxes, leading to errors during data entry.
However, interoperability allows for the electronic exchange of data added to patients’ charts with minimal errors. As a result, your organization can save hundreds of person-hours and focus more on attending to your patient’s medical needs.
2. Prevent Physician Burnout
Many physicians are inundated with data processing tasks. Their EHR inboxes contain documents to read and messages to respond to. Physicians now spend more time typing on their computer screen than taking care of patients.
To reduce this data processing burden, your interface consultant can use interoperability tools to pre-process the metadata of messages, check the content and route the message to the appropriate recipient. This will give doctors more time to spend on taking care of patients.
3. Provide Decision Support
Your clinicians need to determine all the places where a patient received treatment in the past. However, even when treatment notes are available, the volume and format may make them hard to use. Doctors may have limited access to narrative text and diagnostic test images.
To overcome these challenges, your consultant will provide interoperability solutions that can automate patient data exchange. For instance, through a record locator service incorporated into your EHR, your physicians can access patients’ records available in health data exchanges.
4. Help Patients to Participate Actively in Healthcare
Improved patient care is at the heart of interoperability services. When patients have easy access to their medical records through mobile apps, they can participate actively in their medical care.
Patients can also see the results of any tests they take quickly through their app or patient portal. Through this portal, patients can receive education, talk to their doctor, and even upload data from wearables.
Interoperability also prevents emergencies and provides ambulance services for patients whose data show that they need them.
5. Connect to National Interoperability Networks
Regional health information exchanges (HIEs) are being developed at a rapid pace. Your consultant can help you connect your EHR to the best exchange that covers your region for patient data exchange.
As a result, you can send patient data to a specialist in another city and receive feedback about the patient’s Health without making several faxes and phone calls.
Sharing information this way will allow the consultant to have a quick overview of the patient’s condition. And when the patient returns for primary health care, you will have data to understand the patient’s condition better.
Get in Touch With a Reliable HL7 Interface Consultant
If you need to work with a consultant who provides expert interoperability services, call Lifepoint Informatics at 877.522.8378 today. You can also book a free demo of our interoperability solutions through our contact page.