Dr. Shaun Grannis

Problem
Indiana has an advantage that few other places have with a mature health information exchange that covers a broad geographical area. The over 350,000 clinical transactions passing through IHIE daily can be used to support direct patient care, while also making sense of the data on a large scale to improve the health of the population at large. High-impact research efforts led by IHIE’s long-time partner and co-founder, the Regenstrief Institute, demonstrate the impact that IHIE’s “living laboratory” can have to provide support to physicians and improve the health and well-being of patients in Indiana.
Solution
Utilizing the direct connection that IHIE has with providers, Regenstrief developed a notifiable conditions detector tool that scans laboratory results, diagnoses, transcriptions and other data that IHIE delivers to 20,000 physicians. This effort automates the state reporting requirements for many conditions on behalf of IHIE’s participating physicians.

An added benefit to this process is that the lab data can be used to automatically pre-populate public health case reporting forms. By removing barriers to complete these forms while also providing a mechanism to submit them in a timely fashion, this partnership resulted a dramatic increase in submissions. This increase then resulted in a greater than four-fold detection rate of communicable diseases over traditional physician-based reporting methods.
Keywords
DOCS4DOCS Service, D4D Service, public health, public health reporting, case reporting forms, state department of health, Regenstrief Institute, research, notifiable conditions detection
Identifier
Dr. Shaun Grannis
Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics
Regenstrief Institute
Indiana University Health
Clinical setting: Population Health / Research / Notifiable Conditions Detection
Benefits
  • Leverages clinical data in a way that can improve the health all citizens in the state
  • Removes hurdles to participate in public health case reporting forms, while making submission process part of their existing workflow
  • Eliminates need for physicians to have a separate connection to the state for public reporting efforts
Quotes

Doctors like being good citizens of the community, but are often overburdened. This partnership makes it easy for them to fulfill many public health reporting requirements.

IHIE serves as the hub; their direct connection to the providers is the key to conduct large-scale research that can positively impact the health of Indiana’s citizens.

Case Study

Situation:
Notifiable disease data are used for monitoring trends, program planning, evaluation, policy development, research, and monitoring the effectiveness of prevention and control activities in each state in the U.S.  Indiana looked to improve upon the reporting function to ease the burden for its physicians.

Benefits:
By utilizing IHIE’s infrastructure and existing connection to physicians, researchers at Regenstrief linked a notifiable conditions detections tool to the clinical information that passed through the exchange, providing automated reporting on behalf of the physicians.

What it means:
Faster reporting back to the state to identify public health problems and removes burdens for physicians and their staff.