The healthcare industry is stillcommunicating with internal and external providers using antiquated technologies such as fax, legacy EMR systems, and HL7 interfaces. Unfortunately, it tends to be costly and inefficient due to poor latency and missing information which costs patients and doctors time, money, and sometimes lives.

Physician-to-physician communication is vital to the success of any outpatient referral. Optimalcommunication involves the transfer of relevantclinical information in both directions (from the referring physician to the specialist and vice versa). Breakdowns in communication can lead to poorcontinuity ofcare, delayed diagnoses, polypharmacy, increased litigation risk, and unnecessary testing, all of which diminish the quality ofcare.

If 55-65% of revenue is lost due to leakage, then a hospital is losing between $821K to $971K on average per physician per year. For a hospital with 100 affiliated providers, total leakage costs the health system between $78M to $97M per year.

In the US specialist visits constitute more than half of all outpatient visits. Despite the frequency and the importance of the specialty-referral, the process itself has been a long-standing source of frustration for both primary care physicians (PCPs) and specialists. These frustrations, along with a desire to lowercosts, has led to the implementation of numerous strategies to improve the entire process, such as using gatekeepers and/or referral guidelines.

Referral tracking is an important task for the referring provider, to ensure that the referral is completed.

TResults from this study conclude that medical errors stem from multiple breakdowns and both individual and system factors. Increasing awareness and communication between providers will help to prevent missed or delayed diagnoses.

This is a major reason why there has been such a push to move all medical offices and health institutions onto new technology to service and manage their patients. Hospitals using outdate technology is the main source of this issue

Around 40% of these referrals are lost, miscommunicated or forgotten somewhere on a desk at a Physician's staff offices. It has been made evident that most health systems are reluctant to give up old school technology because they see there is no other alternative.

With any cloud-based service, especially in health care, it is very important to know how secure their servers are and what measures are taken to ensure that. As the statistic above has shown us, the number of individuals affected by protected health information breaches is rising drastically, and as more and more health organizations look to cloud-based software to store patient records, it is vital that they invest in reputable and secure vendors.