Connxus Partnership: Real World Data from Health Information Exchanges

Connxus (formerly ICC, the Integrated Care Collaboration) is the Health Information Exchange (HIE) for the Greater Austin/Central Texas area. HIEs organize and store electronic health information of patients across multiple providers and hospitals in one place, allowing doctors, pharmacists, EMTs and other providers to access a more complete longitudinal record of patients’ medical information in a quick, secure, consistent, and cost-effective manner. 

The project team now partners with Connxus to explore and test new ways for HIEs to safely and securely contribute to the generation of new knowledge by participating in population health research, public health surveillance systems, and Distributed Data Networks (DDN) such as the FDA's Sentinel Initiative. Our research team has worked with Connxus to explore the use of new healthcare and data technologies such as Privacy Preserving Record Linkage (PPRL) and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to help manage, share and analyze large healthcare datasets.

This research project is focused on mapping Connxus' data to the Sentinel Common Data Model (SCDM) and creating documentation and materials that will help academic researchers, epidemiologists, and others understand the data available in HIEs and how to participate and partner with HIEs.