The Use of Health Information Technology to Facilitate Data Exchange Between Private Healthcare and Public Health: One Urban Local Public Health Department's Experiences

In 2009, the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) supported two local health departments (LHDs) to create linkages with existing regional health information organizations (RHIOs) and develop data sharing agreements that could support various public health activities, particularly around communicable disease surveillance and preparedness. These demonstration sites can serve as models for other LHDs as well as provide valuable lessons learned for future model refinement. One of the sites selected to participate was the City of Milwaukee Health Department. Its project leveraged the existing Wisconsin Health Information Exchange (WHIE) to achieve two goals: 1) Develop and provide evaluation metrics for the Milwaukee Health Care Partnership, which uses real-time emergency department patient data to improve and rationalize access to care by helping patients find medical homes. 2) Design a communicable disease management module to improve the timeliness and reduce the workload of communicable disease reporting and epidemiologic follow up by both hospital infection control and public health agencies.