HealtheConnections Assists CDC With Public Health Analytic Projects
Community-wide health information exchange (HIE) data offers unique opportunities to inform, support, and promote initiatives aimed at improving health in our communities. HealtheConnections has partnered with Lantana Consulting Group to investigate public health use cases for HIE data. Lantana helps healthcare providers, government agencies, and insurance providers achieve clinical information exchange and health data management, and a strategic partnership was a natural fit.
Our work explores how HIEs can support public health surveillance by making healthcare data more easily reportable and more complete. The most recent analytic projects focused on two public health use cases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN). Since NHSN relies heavily on data reported by healthcare partners to maintain a national healthcare-associated infection tracking system, it was an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the value of HIE data.
The first use case evaluated Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) data from Lexis Nexis and an HIE could be useful in predicting healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), like surgical site infections. To achieve this, HealtheConnections collaborated with Lexis Nexis and matched samples of HIE data with their SDOH data. We combined these with our own clinical data and Z-codes, de-identified the information, and made it available to NHSN for analysis.
The second use case was designed to evaluate the availability of hospital inpatient medication administration data in HealtheConnections and the strength of the association between hospital medication requests and medication administrations. HealtheConnections was able to compile medication request and administration data from select hospitals into a deidentified data set for Lantana to analyze.
Public health partners rely on us for insight and answers to their healthcare data questions. Use cases like this lay the foundation for future implementations that can make a significant difference in public health initiatives. HealtheConnections is continuing to focus on building the trusted relationships and innovative services that make this possible. If you are a public health professional and want to learn more about how HealtheConnections may be able to help you, reach out to us at support@healtheconnections.org to get connected with our team.
