New Data Sources for Population Health Research using Health Information Exchanges
- Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
Anjum Khurshid
Project Summary
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) are a key component of a "Learning Health System" because they can harmonize complex clinical data using standard vocabularies, patient matching and deduplication, and data models that connect back to EHRs for decision support and even linkage with external data.
The goal of this project is to build capacity for Institute-wide collaborations to access, store, and use comprehensive healthcare data from HIEs as a new data source for longitudinal clinical records from diverse populations. This project is establishing the foundations of an informatics infrastructure and strategy that will facilitate impactful research using EHR-based, real-time, real world data from geographically well-defined populations in HIEs. We are building a pipeline of real world, real time, comprehensive, and scalable data from HIEs, which combines various data sources (e.g., EHRs, SDOH, public health, mental health, environmental data) through a single data platform.
Project Details
As a proof of concept use case to test this new infrastructure, this project will begin by using an NIH-funded research question related to maternal health provider shortages and post-natal health outcomes to explore what additional insights and analyses are possible by adding HIE data from Connxus to our research dataset. We are focused on assessing whether the Connxus data allows us to strengthen or deepen our ability to answer existing research questions, and if there are additional research questions we can answer with the Connxus HIE data.
This project is in partnership with Hao Yu and his research team.