A pilot project currently being developed in New York City will use data collected from electronic health record systems to provide city officials with a real-time look at public health.
The NYC Macroscope will use data from the Primary Care Information Project, a network of providers in high-need areas that have received EHR support from the city. Part of the PCIP is technology called the Hub, which allows city officials to send a query to participating providers' systems about the current prevalence of a condition, and receive aggregated data back.
Carolyn Greene, MD, deputy commissioner of the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene's Division of Epidemiology, said her department knows the data may not be representative of the city as a whole, but sees the project as an important step in increasing collaboration between the healthcare industry and local governance.
"I think it does open up the possibility of increasing dialogue between the public health world and the clinical world," said Dr. Greene, according to a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report. "There's some dialogue already, but having data that we are jointly invested in understanding, jointly invested in monitoring — and data that comes from the very EHRs that clinicians are using— I think can only increase the conversation and the collaboration between these two fields."
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