Drew Richardson, Director of Population Health for Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), recently gave a webinar about IHIE and the overall value and benefits Health Information Exchanges (HIE) provide, particularly when it comes to population health. Here are five key takeaways:

  1. HIEs provide value for customers by storing, maintaining, and using data for all parties involved in healthcare. The health data sources combine to create a data repository. IHIE is the data steward, protecting the patient data and using it to provide value-added services.
  2. IHIE manages the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), one of the nation’s largest inter-organizational data repositories that contains over 11 billion clinical data elements over 30 years. The INPC is a robust clinical data repository, a governance structure, and an interoperability technology infrastructure. It is a source of aggregated clinical data for a patient or a population and includes provider, payer, and public health data. It has real-time interfaces from providers, is used heavily in hospital emergency departments, and is growing in use in population health management settings.
  3. There is a wealth of data housed in an HIE, and IHIE can structure unstructured data to provide meaningful value outputs for clients. HIE data can be easily accessed, transported, and normalized for a variety of health information needs.
  4. Population health is not a new concept, but we’re still figuring it out. Analytics tools and big data are helping to examine population health in new, sophisticated ways.
  5. IHIE can be a major contributor in the population health space by providing informational intervention, enhancing health improvement programs, measuring quality or effectiveness, combining value of claims and clinical data, and identifying physician attribution

Watch the full webinar.