Expanding IIS to Electronic Health Record: Tracking and Reporting Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI)

Learning Objectives for this Presentation:
By the end of the presentation participants will be able to describe the system functionalities, discuss the challenges encountered during application development and roll-out to the users, will review successes and users feedback.

Background:
: NJ law (P.L. 2001, ch. 373) requires the Department of Health and Senior Services to “establish a central registry of newborns identified as having or being at risk of developing a hearing loss”. Oversight for implementation of this legislation is the responsibility of the New Jersey EHDI program. The EHDI program has partnered with the New Jersey Immunization Information System (NJIIS) for monitoring and reporting of newborn hearing testing.

Objectives:
Use web-based NJIIS to allow primary care providers to view information about their patients' hearing screening and follow-up status; and to allow audiologists and other providers who perform outpatient audiologic evaluations to report results electronically and efficiently to the EHDI program

Methods:
1.Establish security levels for EHDI program, audiologists and health care providers
2.Use Electronic Birth Certificates to populate EHDI-related fields in NJIIS and allow providers to see the results.
3.Establish on-line interface for audiologists to submit outpatient follow-up and lost to follow-up reports.
4.Produce reports for EHDI program, audiologists and providers.

Results:
Since project implementation in September 2006, 50% of New Jersey's audiologists have entered data at the point of screening. Primary care providers have real time access to inpatient and outpatient screening results. The EHDI program's manual data entry has been reduced by 70%.

Conclusions:
This project demonstrated that a well established IIS can be extended to other health preventive programs to improve the completeness of a health record at the provider's office, reduce paper work and manual data entry at the program level, while improving the quality of care and educational services available to the client.