Using Health Information Exchange to Automate Disease Reporting

July 15, 2020 - For most healthcare organizations, reporting and finding all the necessary information about a new case of a reportable disease can be a burdensome process that could take up to two weeks to fully process, and sometimes it can get lost in the shuffle.

It begins with the laboratory faxing a report to the health department. Then the health department follows up with the clinic to get a more detailed report. If the detailed report does not come back right away, an administrator would have to follow up with the clinic again.

With more cases piling up over the course of a week or two, the health department could be forced to close the case and move on if they did not receive the detailed report from the clinic.

Because of this manual process, Brian Dixon, PhD, director of public health informatics at the Regenstrief Institute, and his team of experts knew they needed to automate disease tracking and surveillance in the state of Indiana.