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DHINand the Greater Good
Jan Lee, MD
I information exchange in the country, Delaware Health Infor- mation Network (DHIN). Nearly eight years later independent Delaware is improving the health of Delawareans, improving the patient experience of care, and reducing health care costs.
As a physician serving with the U.S. Air Force, I spent much of my career moving from base to base and country to country. Before
the days of the internet, smart phones, or the cloud, my personal medical record traveled with me as a paper record. To this day, I’m nearly a quarter-century, following me — and hundreds of thou- sands of service men and women — across oceans and continents.
Data sharing has come a long way since those days, when the exchange of information meant just that — handing a medical record from one medical provider to another.
Today’s information sharing is quicker, easier, and more effective. Through health information exchanges like DHIN, patient information is available in real-time — no more searching phone call with lab results.
The value of today’s information exchange is in its immediacy: Data empowers health care teams to make decisions, order tests, and prescribe the treatments patients need saving time, money, and lives in the process.
Since its beginnings as a public-private partnership established by the Delaware General Assembly, DHIN has created value for the thousands of medical professionals who access the Community Health Record each day. Health care teams save time by not chasing down records; data senders save money by submitting results only once; and physicians save lives through immediate access to the patient data necessary to make medical decisions.
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Del Med J | June 2015 | Vol. 87 | No. 6
