Whoosh!: Building and Controlling Wisconsin HIE's Clinical Data Stream for Local and State Health Departments

Regional health information exchanges (HIE) are beginning to fulfill the promise of providing substantial clinical data for public health use.  The Wisconsin HIE began sharing clinical information from three competing integrated health systems with 15 local and one state public health departments in Spring, 2008.  This presentation will discuss what obstacles were overcome to acheive the cooperation of clinical data providers and how legal issues were addressed.  When the system went live, over 620,000 records from 51 provider sites became available for public health analysis, growing at a rate of 146,000 records each month.  We will describe the technical architecture used to gather, store, display and analyze data; and how public health data users are adapting to these new large and untidy data flows.