What are the Advantages of Electronic Data Interchange

The complexity of American healthcare has resulted in a highly elaborate and meandering process that begins with the scheduling of an appointment and ends with providers getting paid. The complicated workflows that happen between a patient booking a consultation and the doctor getting reimbursed is made possible using electronic data interchange. 

An electronic data exchange system at a hospital has become indispensable for running everyday operations. As the name suggests, a healthcare electronic data interchange solution is a medium of exchanging data between medical organizations using standardized message formats, in a secure way. These medical organizations could be hospitals, clinics, ambulatory care centers, insurance companies, pharmacies, testing laboratories, radiology centers, and so forth. Before the EDI data exchange system was implemented, there were close to 400 information formats in use.

The different formats had been made by different companies and organizations involved in the healthcare industry used different ones. Needless to point out, it led to errors in conversion, difficulties in interoperability, security lapses, and high IT overhead. But electronic data exchange in healthcare ironed out those kinks and brought about a uniform, consolidated system of exchanging important medical data among stakeholder organizations. 

Conclusion

Electronic data interchange in healthcare has brought speed, efficiency, and security to all aspects of data interchange in healthcare. The result is a win-win for all stakeholders involved.