Page 46 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

Expert Testimonial

As a national leader in health information technology for
large health care systems and providers, Epic strives to
integrate data entry and clinical decision support seamlessly
into the workflow of busy providers’ electronic medical records. Our
clients tell us of the added time to their day needed for electronic
processes, and it is in our business interest to lessen this burden. When
we work with our clients on projects that involve integration with
government public health agencies—like disease reporting—we often
Chris Alban, hear that the public health agency is not ready to receive automated
electronic reports due to public health’s technical and workforce
MD, MBA capacity challenges.
Vice President,
Clinical Informatics On behalf of Epic, we support the Digital Bridge collaborative and
Epic the eCR initiative. It’s the first step in achieving the Digital Bridge’s
vision for the future of public health surveillance: a centralized system
and repository that all provider organizations and public health agents
integrate with to facilitate the bidirectional flow of data, knowledge,
and guidance—and doing this all by lessening the burden for clinicians
and epidemiologists.

A fully interoperable electronic public health surveillance system
would improve public health outcomes via several contributing factors.
First, it will provide easy access to reportable data for epidemiologists,
leading to a greater understanding of the spread of disease and how
it can be reduced. Specifically in the case of outbreaks, it will enable
early detection for a rapid response and the prevention of a broader
spread. Second, the ability to provide in-workflow clinical guidance to
James Doyle clinicians will make it easier for them to do the right thing, and reduce
Research & Development the chance any patients or steps in a clinical guideline are missed.
Product Lead Finally, it will allow for operations that are significantly more efficient.
Epic In health care provider organizations, there will be less time spent on
manual reporting and communication, or on the implementation of
clinical guidelines. Public health agencies will save time currently spent
on gathering and standardizing data for analysis.

While most of this work is theoretically possible with our
current system that is dependent on manual data gathering and
communication, time and resource constraints prevent much of it
from happening with a reasonable turnaround time. This system will
enable everyone involved (particularly epidemiologists, clinicians,
and their staff) to do more of this important work. With a fully
interoperable connection between health care delivery organizations
and public health, the prospect of real-time alerting, decision support,
and analysis of trends comes that much closer to reality.

Changing from the Slow Lane to the Fast Lane 46