Leveraging Health Information Exchange to Support Public Health Situational Awareness: The Indiana Experience

Authors

  • Shaun J Grannis The Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine
  • Kevin Stevens Marion County Health Department, Indiana
  • Ricardo Merriwether Indiana University School of Medicine

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v2i2.3213

Abstract

Public health situational awareness is contingent upon timely, comprehensive and accurate information from clinical systems. Ad-hoc models for sending non-standard clinical information directly to public health are inefficient and increasingly unsustainable. Information sharing models that leverage Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are emerging. HIEs standardize, aggregate and streamline information sharing among data partners, including public health stakeholders, and HIE has supported public health practice in Indiana for more than 10 years. To accelerate nationwide adoption of HIE-supported situational awareness processes, the CDC awarded three HIEs across the nation, including Indiana, New York and Washington/Idaho. The Indiana partners included Indiana University School of Medicine, Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Health Information Exchange, Indiana State Department of Health, Health & Hospital Corporation of Marion County, and Children’s Hospital Boston. Activities included augmenting biosurveillance processes, enabling bi-directional communication, enhancing automated detection of notifiable conditions, and demonstrating technological advances at national forums. HIE transactions destined for public health were enhanced with standardized clinical vocabulary and more complete physician contact information. During the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, the HIE delivered targeted public health broadcast messages to providers in Marion County, Indiana. We will review the partnership characteristics, activities, accomplishments and future directions for our health information exchange. Keywords: health information exchange, situational awareness, biosurveillance, syndromic surveillance, influenza.

Author Biographies

Shaun J Grannis, The Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine

Shaun Grannis is Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at Indiana University and Medical Informatics Research Scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, where his interests include developing, implementing, and studying technology to overcome the challenges of integrating data from distributed systems to support public health, clinical care, and research. Dr. Grannis received his M.D. degree from Michigan State University, an M.S. in Clinical research and Informatics from Indiana University, and has a B.S. in aerospace engineering from M.I.T.

Kevin Stevens, Marion County Health Department, Indiana

Kevin C. Stevens, MPH, MA currently serves dual roles as an epidemiologist with the Marion County Health Department in Indianapolis, Indiana and as the public health informatician at Regenstrief Institute. Mr. Stevens represents MCHD as the local public health partner in the fulfillment of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contract ?Accelerating Situational Awareness through Health Information Exchange? and evaluates the quality and quantity of clinical information sent to public health. For this special issue, Mr. Stevens served as the managing editor by developing the outline, coordinating the paper writing process and managing the paper submissions.

Downloads

Published

2010-10-26

How to Cite

Grannis, S. J., Stevens, K., & Merriwether, R. (2010). Leveraging Health Information Exchange to Support Public Health Situational Awareness: The Indiana Experience. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 2(2). https://doi.org/10.5210/ojphi.v2i2.3213

Issue

Section

Original Articles