Tracking address information through an HIE can identify patients who are likely homeless and help identify better registration and treatment for them.
Using Healthix, a New York City-based HIE, researchers isolated the address information of patients and identified those who listed as their home addresses the address of a hospital, homeless shelter, place of worship or address containing a keyword synonymous with "homelessness." The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, identified 1 percent of the more than 7.8 million patients as likely to have been homeless.
"Homeless patients experience poor health outcomes and consume a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources compared with domiciled patients," the authors wrote. "There is increasing interest in the federal government in providing care coordination for homeless patients, which will require a systematic way of identifying these individuals."
The researchers noted this is a projection, and they did not have confirmation that these individuals were homeless, only likely to be. The algorithm they developed also only includes hospitals and healthcare providers that participate in the exchange and is limited to the geographic area encompassed by the HIE — if a patient listed his or her address outside the region, it would not detect it.
However, the researchers concluded a more refined approach and the creation of a standardized and structured field to record patients' housing status could make the results more accurate.