As medical care facilities seek to support patient safety and be responsive to their complete medical needs and histories, health centers also recognize that establishing an infrastructure for data sharing must be a top priority. Better practices for Health Information Exchange (HIE) increase patient wellbeing by giving providers more complete information for clinical decision making, eliminating unnecessary procedures and tests, reducing the burden of paperwork, and lowering costs. In 2020, HITEQ interviewed five groups that implemented clinical data sharing infrastructure in health care settings, including Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). A set of example use cases were developed from these interviews, and we identified ten themes that may help guide other organizations interested in implementing HIE. Information from 1424 qualified health centers and health center look-alikes from the CY2019 Uniform Data Set also informed the current impact of data sharing, indicating that technology and potential workflows exist to support HIE within FQHCs.

View the key considerations gleaned from this research to identify lessons learned related to establishing HIE within a health center setting. The resource is available in the Documents to Download section below.