The organization responsible operating Maine’s statewide health information exchange (HIE), HealthInfoNet, has announced it is participating in Demonstrating the Preventative Care Value of Health Information Exchanges, an initiative led by the Chantilly, Va.-based Agilex, a program aimed at s establishing technical standards and protocols that HIEs can use to report de-identified, population-level preventative care data to public health officials.
“We are excited to have HealthInfoNet participate in this important program,”Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., director of the Center for Disease Control’s Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations, said in a statement. “Our goal is to establish the role that leading HIEs can play in advancing key preventative care initiatives. We believe that by making information on existing clinical quality measures available on an aggregate basis, we can help public health officials at the state and local levels better understand the unique population health challenges in their community. This specific program will work to create the technical infrastructure needed to transmit this data on a secure and reliable basis to state and local jurisdictions.”
The program aims to use the clinical quality measures that healthcare providers must report to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to meet federal meaningful use requirements. It will focus on thirteen clinical quality measures related to cardiovascular conditions. By aggregating these measures across a population, public health officials can look for trends and develop more effective interventions.
HealthInfoNet is using an open-source application called popHealth to de-identify, aggregate and securely transmit clinical quality measures to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Maine CDC).
“Supporting public health has been part of HealthInfoNet’s mission from the beginning. We currently automate mandated reporting of communicable diseases to the Maine CDC,” Dev Culver, HealthInfoNet’s CEO, said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to be the first statewide HIE to participate in this program, and we’re excited to provide further value to public health efforts here in Maine and across the nation.”
