Public health planning researchers in Indiana are trying to figure out if they can use data from a source that’s potentially hugely insightful but has typically been off-limits: electronic health records.
Researchers from Indiana University and Purdue University are studying the feasibility of using deidentified EHR data to tailor regional public health planning for Marion County, home to greater Indianapolis, with a $200,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
“When there is a limited budget for, say, preventing diabetes, the county health department has to determine how to spend its resources,” principal investigator Brian Dixon, an assistant professor of health informatics in the IU School of Informatics, said in a media release.
“One choice is to evenly divide the money across all communities within the county, some of which probably don’t have as much need as others. A second choice is to identify specific areas within the county that might need intervention the most,” said Dixon, also a researcher at the Regenstrief Institute and the Roudebush VA Medical Center.
Figuring out how to make that second choice more broadly available to public health agencies is one of Dixon’s aims.
Dixon and other researchers are planning to analyze deidentified EHR data from Marion County residents in various groupings: ZIP codes (each with an average population of 8,000), neighborhoods (average populations of 3,000 to 4,500) and census blocks (average populations of 1,500).
With most of the EHR data in Indiana is already standardized and increasingly made available for research through the statewide HIE, the researchers will start by determining how easily they can measure the rates of common diagnoses or preventative measures, such as flu shots, at sub-county levels, and then seeing if they can incorporate those data with Census and other sub-county data on socio-economic factors.
The researchers will also examine whether those datasets can be further integrated with data on community health indicators like access to parks and natural space, healthcare facilities and grocery stores. Source
