Better connections mean better medical care

Consider these all-too-common scenarios:

▪ Your child is injured at school and taken to the hospital. You’re not there to tell the doctors and nurses in the emergency room about her drug allergies and medical history, so they have to delay treatment until they can get this information.

▪ You’re on vacation, and you experience chest pains. You go to the local hospital, where multiple tests are run. When you go home and see your doctor for a follow-up, you don’t remember what tests were run, and you don’t have the results. So you have to undergo the same expensive tests again.

▪ Before your first appointment with a new specialist, you have to fill out pages and pages of medical history questions and sign multiple forms to have your medical records sent from your old doctor to the new one. But when you show up at your appointment, the medical records haven’t arrived yet, and you have to reschedule.

Each of these challenging, inconvenient and even life-threatening situations — and many others like them — could be avoided if your health-care providers participate in SCHIEx.

Health care today is delivered through a complex system of physicians, hospitals, public-health facilities, pharmacies, laboratories and imaging centers. One of the biggest challenges is how to share medical information within this system. Fortunately, health-information technology offers a solution: Health-information exchanges (not to be confused with health-insurance exchanges) make it possible for important health information to be available — in real time — to the providers who need to see it.

SCHIEx (pronounced SKY-eks) is South Carolina’s health-information exchange: an electronic network that allows health-care professionals to access and share — securely and appropriately — patients’ vital medical information, thereby helping them make well-informed medical decisions.

SCHIEx is not a data warehouse. It transmits information, but doesn’t store it. It’s a secure information highway that enables participating health-care providers to locate and view a patient’s medical history, such as medications, diagnoses and procedures involving other participating providers.

Before electronic information exchanges, doctors would fax patient information to each other. SCHIEx is like a fax, only new and improved: It’s instantaneous, and it can’t be faxed to the wrong number or read by the wrong person.

The information exchanged via SCHIEx is only that which is relevant — the results of a test, for instance, but not the reasons why the doctor ordered the test. It does not include all of the private information you shared with your doctor. What is shared is the information about your health care that your provider has determined is essential for another health-care professional to know.

You can choose at any time to opt out of having your health information exchanged through SCHIEx. However, participating in SCHIEx offers numerous benefits for you as a patient and for the health of everyone in the state. It enhances the coordination of patient care among providers, improves the quality and efficacy of care that a patient receives, improves patient safety, reduces medical errors and duplicative services, and enhances public health and disease detection and monitoring.

SCHIEx is run by a private nonprofit organization based in Columbia. It’s the designated statewide health-information exchange for South Carolina, and it complies with nationally recognized standards for information exchanges.

We have made tremendous progress in the development and expansion of SCHIEx in just the past two years. Today more than 500 health-care delivery sites (such as physician practices and hospitals) participate in SCHIEx. We’re also taking the first steps to connect SCHIEx with the Georgia health information exchange, so that going out of state for medical care doesn’t impede the quality of that care.

But the benefits of SCHIEx don’t go as far as they could, because many providers still aren’t participating. Ideally, your essential health information will be available to every health-care provider who treats you.

I urge you to ask your health-care providers whether they participate in SCHIEx.

Our mission at SCHIEx is to improve the quality, safety and efficiency of health care for South Carolinians. Please join us in building this network and improving health across the state.

This story was originally published March 7, 2016 at 9:12 AM with the headline "Better connections mean better medical care."