Page 45 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

The Digital Bridge
A unique forum that brings together
decision makers in health care, public
health, and health information technology,
the Digital Bridge aims to address the
challenges surrounding data exchange
and the use of electronic health data
between the health care and public health
communities. The goals of the Digital
Bridge are to:
• Ease the burden and costs for all
stakeholder groups through a unified
approach to information exchange;
• Advance greater standards-based
information exchange across public
health and health care;
• Lay the foundation for greater
bidirectional exchange of data
so that clinicians can be more
informed about population health,
environmental risks, and outbreaks.
25
As its inaugural project, the Digital Bridge
partners are collaborating to build a
national framework for eCR. eCR harnesses
the power and information stored in EHRs.
The partners have developed processes
that automatically flag potential disease
cases from data in a patient’s EHR, and
create a report that is electronically sent
to public health for analysis. This reduces
burdensome manual, paper-based
processes for both health care providers
and public health professionals, ultimately
improving timely outbreak response.
The Digital Bridge has positioned seven
sites across the country that pair a
health care entity with a government
public health agency to demonstrate eCR
implementation. Each demonstration site
is a collaboration between a public health
agency, a health care provider, and a data
provider/EHR vendor. Two sites—Houston
(Houston Methodist Hospital and the
Houston City Health Department) and
Utah (Intermountain Healthcare and the
Utah Department of Health)—are actively
in production with eCR. Designed to
be scalable and standardized, the other
five sites are positioned to move into the
production phase. Given adequate funding,
eCR is feasible nationwide.
25 Current State of Data Exchange. digitalbridge.us. https://
digitalbridge.us/infoex/about/.
Recommendation 5: PARTNERSHIP & INNOVATION
with the Public & Private Sectors
Protecting population health through public health
surveillance begins at the bedside, as health care
providers in the private sector diagnose and treat
individual patients and provide data on reportable
diseases and conditions to governmental public health
departments. Public health is reliant upon the health
care sector to generate the public health data that
informs prevention and response efforts. Indeed, public
health cannot effectively address public health threats
without the health care sector. Similarly, the health care
sector—including patients—stands to greatly benefit
from bidirectional information sharing about public
health threats, as well as efficiencies and reductions
to provider burden associated with automated data
exchange.
Enabling data exchange between the health care sector
and the public health sector requires all entities—health
care providers, CDC, and state, territorial, local, and
tribal public health departments—to use the same
meaningful data standards. Without this, interoperability
is impossible. For health care and public health to benefit
from the wealth of data available in EHRs, a consensus-
based standards process must develop data standards
that will support both clinical care and public health.
Ongoing public-private partnerships, such as the Digital
Bridge (see left), bring together governmental public
health, health care providers, health care systems, and
IT vendors. This is essential to public health surveillance
transformation, and must continue. Though it has been
challenging for public health to keep pace with emerging
technologies, many of these technological advancements
have been used for years by the private sector, and the
public health community should seek partnerships to
leverage the private sector’s experience and expertise.
By working together, the health care and public health
sectors can advance both fields by collaborating on
efforts similar to the Digital Bridge and developing
consensus-based data standards. Future technological
advances will continue to transform data exchange,
and long-term partnerships between public health and
the private sector will help public health prosper from
technological advancements and innovation.
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