public
health

HealtheConnections supports public health by connecting local health departments to the health information exchange, providing data for disease surveillance, and partnering with health departments on research and the evaluation of public health initiatives.

helping address
social determinants of health (SDoH)

  • SDoH are conditions in the environment where people are born, live, learn, work, play and age that can influence health and well-being
  • We are promoting the use of SDoH screening tools (e.g., PRAPARE) to help standardize SDoH data, and the use of ICD-10 Z-Codes to document the information
  • HealtheConnections can play a role in making SDoH data centrally available on the HIE to support public health

support public health
clinics, outbreak investigations, and medical examiner
determinations

  • Querying comprehensive clinical patient records from hundreds of data sources
  • Sending secure, HIPAA-compliant communications for fast and easy-care coordination
  • Viewing results delivered into your own electronic health records system for easy access
  • Connecting to other state and federal partners
  • Support emergency preparedness

support public health
surveillance

Examples of tools for local health departments:

  • myPopHealth: interactive reports of estimates of disease prevalence for diseases like hypertension, diabetes, prediabetes, and more. Prevalence estimates are presented with filtering for demographics and geography and are updated weekly.
  • opioid overdose report: interactive report of weekly counts of hospital emergency department and inpatient visits with an opioid overdose diagnosis. Counts of hospital visits are presented with stratification by geography, time period, care setting, opioid type, and demographics.
  • perinatal syphilis report: a comprehensive report of health data for women with a diagnosis or a positive laboratory test result of syphilis and a positive indication of pregnancy in the past 280 days. An alert, sent via email, is triggered when new patients are added or updated to the report.
  • COVID reports: up-to-date reports of COVID-19 vaccinations and positive COVID-19 cases are stratified by time period, demographics and other key information.

 

We invite all Local Health Departments to request these reports, as they are vital to the work you do.

support public health
research
and evaluation activities

  • Using HIE data for public health research to investigate causes of disease
  • Using HIE data to evaluate public health initiatives, by monitoring health outcomes