Enhancing Public Health Insights with HIE (Health Information Exchange) Data: A Workgroup Assessing Feasibility of a National Federation of HIEs for Population Health Surveillance

Presentation Time: 08:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Abstract Keywords: Biosurveillance, Data Sharing, Data Standards, Data Transformation/ETL, Health Equity, Interoperability and Health Information Exchange, Population Health, Real-World Evidence Generation
Primary Track: Applications
Programmatic Theme: Public Health Informatics
Moderator: Anjum Khurshid, MD, PhD
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute

Hypothesis

A distributed research network of HIEs connected through common data models (CDMs) and co-designed data quality protocols can serve as a national resource for timely, comprehensive, and efficient public health surveillance and population health studies.

Background

While many national public health surveillance systems rely primarily on claims data to conduct analyses, claims data provides limited insights (e.g. difficulty creating longitudinal record) and analysis (i.e. only includes individuals with health insurance with successfully processed claims). Simultaneously, legal, technical, and data quality issues make it difficult for national-level surveillance networks to use more timely and clinically-rich electronic health record (EHR) data . Thankfully, the implementation of USCDI, launch of TEFCA, continued adoption of FHIR, and the increased capacity of HIEs provide opportunities to rethink national solutions.
We convened a workgroup of HIE leaders from California, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Texas.

Methods

This workgroup developed guiding principles and a statement of purpose to focus on what technologies, tools, technical expertise, relationships, legal considerations, governance, regulatory components and data standards are needed for a federation of HIEs to securely and efficiently function as a national distributed data network that supports public health. The workgroup is designing a proof-of-concept (POC) pilot with 6 HIEs to establish scalable and replicable pathways for different levels of technologies (e.g. FHIR, non-FHIR). Each HIE will transform synthetic data into a CDM following their local policies, procedures and technologies to co-design practical and implementable solutions. A subsequent pilot in 2025 plans to demonstrate the real-world feasibility of this system.

Speaker(s):
Daniel Chavez
San Diego Health Connect

Eliel Oliveira, MS, MBA, FAMIA
Harvard Medical School

David Kendrick, MD
OU School of Community Medicine, MyHealth Access Network

Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS
Rhode Island Quality Institute & Brown University

Author(s):
David Kendrick, MD - OU School of Community Medicine, MyHealth Access Network; Neil Sarkar, PhD, MLIS - Rhode Island Quality Institute & Brown University; Eliel Oliveira, MS, MBA, FAMIA - Harvard Medical School; Dan Chavez - HealthTech Solutions;