Public Health and HIE Case Studies

The Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), founded at the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., began standardizing and linking information across multiple hospital systems in 1994.  Thus it has “grandparent” status among HIE organizations, and began well before electronic health records (EHRs) were common practice.  INPC is now the core registry at the center of the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), which, like the Marion County Public Health Department, is centered on Indianapolis.

View and download the case study here.

Tracking the performance of community chronic disease prevention programs often requires near-real-time, small area data.  But in 2013 most health jurisdictions relied on occasional reports of large-area surveys like the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey (BRFS).  Meanwhile, risk factors like obesity, blood pressure and smoking are recorded daily in medical records across the community.  HIE provides hope for access to more robust real-time, small-area data.  Since the data originates from healthcare providers, this simultaneously creates opportunities to promote evidence-based prevention in both the clinic and the community.

View and download the case study here.

While healthcare providers are receiving CMS incentive funding for electronic health record (EHR) adoption and information exchange, most community partners – like health departments, mental health agencies and school nurses – are not.  The SE Minnesota BEACON demonstration project sought transformation from a provider-centric model to one that is patient-driven and incorporates community partners, partly by finding technological solutions to this mismatch.

View and download the case study here.