Indiana state researchers have launched the Indiana Network for Population Health (INPH), designed to share social determinants of health (SDOH) data with researchers, policy makers, healthcare providers and others on the front lines.
The network has been launched by the Regenstrief Institute and collaborators, including the state of Indiana, Indiana University and the Indiana Health Information Exchange, to provide the secure exchange of comprehensive data—especially information on SDOH such as housing stability and access to nutritious food, officials noted in a press release this week.
Research has historically shown that social determinants of health, such as tobacco use, alcohol consumption, exercise, access to nutritional food, stable housing, reliability of transportation and many other non-medical factors, are more significant contributors to longevity and quality of life than either healthcare or genetic makeup or the two combined. Yet these data are rarely accessible to physicians through their electronic health record (EHR) systems.
"It's not that physicians have totally ignored social determinants of health, but impactful information -- such as the fact that the patient had to take time off from a low-paying job and ride two buses to get to the doctor's office -- isn't typically collected in electronic medical records," said Brian Dixon, Ph.D., director of public health informatics at Regenstrief Institute and Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI.
He added, "A clinician may have noted in unstructured free text in the medical record that an individual is a heavy smoker or homeless, for example, but free text information, with its lack of uniformity, can be difficult to extract correctly. Will a computer extracting data from the patient's file capture the phrase ‘has no safe home’ or simply ignore the first two words and see ‘safe home’ and not make this information accessible to community programs like the YMCA or homeless shelter organizations who might help the patient find a better place to live?” Dixon pondered.
He further noted that integrating SDOH data into a health information exchange (HIE) network from the patient's medical file is a big challenge. As such, a core vision of the Indiana Network for Population Health is to retrieve data from the CDC, various state departments, census, Social Security, the food stamp program, etc. since all these entities routinely collect this data, said Dixon.
"The Indiana Network for Population Health can broadly enhance health surveillance in the community, tracking diseases we know well like Hepatitis C and diabetes as well as new diseases such as COVID-19," he said. "It's already providing situational awareness to physicians and public health officials about addictions and, in the future, we hope it will connect patients to community-based services to help them address their social determinants of health."
The Indiana Network for Population Health is an extension of the Indiana Network for Patient Care, which currently holds approximately 12 billion pieces of clinical data. Both the Indiana Network for Population Heath and the Indiana Network for Patient Care were developed by Regenstrief and are managed by the Indiana Health Information Exchange.
