Achieving public health benefits from health information exchange

As more health care providers join the Wisconsin Health Information Exchange and send data, it is possible to leverage all this information to identify potential public health threats. Data collected from each patient visit is stripped of patient-specific identifiers and is transmitted to an archive where it can be measured against disease profiles and anomalies in the data can be found. This syndromic surveillance system can alert officials, quickly identifying public health threats such as a flu outbreak, foodborne illness, or weather related impacts. Officials in the Wisconsin Division of Health Services, Department of Public Health and the City of Milwaukee Public Health Department can match symptoms captured by electronic records to patients reporting in a concentrated area and issue a public health alert. This real-time surveillance can in turn alert physicians to watch for patients presenting specific symptoms. This is a prime example of how WHIE is leveraging the health information exchange to use and reuse the data collected in new ways.