Progress, Challenges For Provider Reporting Of Public Health Data
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
ONC brief discusses electronic reporting progress and challenges ahead.
As the volume of data coming in to public health agencies from EHRs continues to increase, the technical and administrative infrastructure must be built to receive the data. That’s a core finding in a new issue brief from the Office of the National Coordinator for HIT, timed for release during the recent Public Health Informatics Conference in Atlanta.
Lauren Wu, policy analyst for ONC, explained in a recent blog post that using health IT tools, electronic reporting of public health data can report data in a faster, more efficient manner than traditional paper-based and fax reporting, allowing public health departments to better protect the community’s health. Public health departments can then use the collected data to understand how much disease is in a community and to develop responses more quickly and efficiently.
From only eight states in 2006 who could accept lab results electronically, the number has risen to 48 states. Over 1,800 provider sites nationwide have updated their EHRs to electronically send immunization data to registries. Immunization registries help providers give the right vaccines at the right time. Since the beginning of HITECH, more and more primary care providers are choosing to report public health data like lab results and immunizations electronically.
While access to more data allows for better information to combat disease, it also poses the challenge of establishing the proper infrastructure to support the frequent data feeds that accompanying the increasing real-time data collection, according to the ONC document.
In the document, Wu acknowledges that the "utility of EHR data for supplemental purposes such as public health reporting, research, patient-safety event reporting, and coverage determination has been limited due to lack of uniformity in the terminology and definitions of data elements across EHRs." Another issue for data analysis is that clinicians often report information in unstructured free text. Wu explains that linking EHR data with other data in a uniform and structured way could improve population health, safety, quality and research.
In response, last year as part of the government’s Standards & Interoperability Framework initiative – comprising industry stakeholders tackling interoperability challenges – a group was formed to work on these issues. Called the Public Health Tiger Team, the group is identifying public use cases, developing and consolidating common data elements and building metadata that can be used to pre-populate forms in EHRs.
The Tiger Team is set to merge with the Public Health Reporting Initiative, part of the S&I Framework, whose goal is to harmonize HIT standards and implementation guides for interoperable bi-directional communication between clinical care and public health entities for different types of public health reporting.
More information is available here.