The spread of HIEs has encroached on the territory of public health registries, such as immunization registries, raising questions of whether one or the other is redundant.
Public health registries are "organized systems for the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis and dissemination of information on individual persons who have either a particular disease, a condition that predisposes to the occurrence of a health-related event or prior exposure to substances known or suspected to cause adverse health effects," according to the Joint Public Health Informatics Taskforce.
Public health registries have become more specialized systems, using modern databases of information on specific diseases. HIMSS suggests that HIEs can provide a bridge between these wells of information and the healthcare community, which generates data and could use the information from the registry if it were more successful.
Here are five ways HIEs and public health registries could work together, according to HIMSS.
1. Transport and technology: HIEs can provide gateways to state networks and connectivity required for state-hosted registries. The information in registries can be of great use to clinicians, and HIEs can help shuttle information from one registry to another.
2. Data aggregation: HIEs are more comprehensive than public health registries, so they can combine public health data and local and clinical administrative data into expanded population health views.
3. Patient identity and matching: Both HIEs and public health registries have experience in trying to ensure that a patient's record is accurate. Cross-checking patient information with public health registries with clinical records could help improve patient identity confirmation.
4. Onboarding: The use of these technologies requires extensive knowledge, and having to go through training twice to use both systems is a significant demand on providers' time. HIEs and public health agencies can use each other's networks to exchange educational information to avoid repetition and save providers time.
5. Eliminate redundancies: Although the systems have evolved differently, they share common objectives and have different capabilities. Working together allows them to collaborate and eliminate redundancies while still leveraging one another's skills to the most efficiency.