Optimizing Health IT: From the Chambers of Congress to the Frontlines of Care

Julia Adler-Milstein, Director, Center for Clinical Informatics and Improvement Research, UCSF. Julie has spent the past decade studying the progress of electronic health information exchange (HIE) and EHR system interoperability in the U.S. She discusses the policy context and how federal policy efforts have sought to intervene to promote health information exchange. Despite substantial resources devoted to HIE, several recent evidence reviews reveal that we still lack a robust understanding of the extent to which HIE improves care, and, more importantly, the underlying mechanisms. To help address this gap, Julia presents results from a recent study that assesses whether an approach to HIE that involves data exchange directly within the EHR is associated with improved care in the Emergency Department, and whether this relationship is mediated by a key hypothesized mechanism: the timeliness of information return.