Dr. Shaun Grannis

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.
Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics
Regenstrief Institute
Indiana University Health
Clinical setting: Population Health / Research / Notifiable Conditions Detection
- 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
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.
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.