Use of Electronic Health Records to Support a Public Health Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States: A Perspective from Fifteen Academic Medical Centers

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Abstract

Our goal is to summarize the collective experience of fifteen organizations in dealing with uncoordinated efforts that result in unnecessary delays in understanding, predicting, preparing for, containing, and mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic in the USA. Response efforts involve the collection and analysis of data corresponding to healthcare organizations, public health departments, socioeconomic indicators, as well as additional signals collected directly from individuals and communities. We focused on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) data, since EHRs can be leveraged and scaled to improve clinical care, research, and to inform public health decision-making. We outline the current challenges in the data ecosystem and the technology infrastructure that are relevant to COVID-19, as witnessed in our fifteen institutions. The infrastructure includes registries and clinical data networks to support population-level analyses. We propose a specific set of strategic next steps to increase interoperability, overall organization and efficiencies.

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Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Am Med Inform Assoc

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Am Med Inform Assoc

Journal ID (publisher-id): jamia

Title: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISSN (Print): 1067-5027

ISSN (Electronic): 1527-974X

Publication date (Electronic): 03 November 2020

Electronic Location Identifier: ocaa287

Affiliations

[1 ]Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics, Georgetown University Medical Center Washington , DC

[2 ]Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center , Nashville, TN

[3 ]Department of Population Medicine, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and Harvard Medical School , Boston, MA

[4 ] University of California Health System (UC Health) , University of California, San Francisco, CA

[5 ]Departments of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology and Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University , Portland, OR

[6 ] Indiana University School of Medicine, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. , Indianapolis, IN

[7 ]Department of Learning Health Sciences, University of Michigan , Ann Arbor, MI

[9 ]Institute for Biomedical Informatics, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia, PA

[10 ]Department of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School , Boston, MA

[11 ]Institute for Informatics, Washington University in St. Louis, School of Medicine , St. Louis, MO

[12 ] North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services , Raleigh, NC

[13 ]Department of Population Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medicine , New York, NY

[14 ]Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education, University of Washington , Seattle, WA

[15 ]Department of Biomedical Informatics, Associate Dean for Informatics and Technology, University of California San Diego Health , La Jolla, CA

[16 ]Division of Health Services Research & Development, VA San Diego Healthcare System , San Diego, CA

Author notes

Corresponding Author, Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine, Chair, UC San Diego Health, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Associate Dean for Informatics and Technology, University of California School of Medicine, lohnomachado@ 123456health.ucsd.edu

Article

Publisher ID: ocaa287

DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa287

PMC ID: 7665546

PubMed ID: 33260207

SO-VID: 9863982e-1c9f-42aa-aef1-3c3d51441cb8

License:

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com

History

Date received : 18 September 2020

Date revision received : 28 October 2020

Date accepted : 29 October 2020

Page count

Pages: 19

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edited-state accepted-manuscript

article-lifecycle PAP

ScienceOpen disciplines: Bioinformatics & Computational biology

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Bioinformatics & Computational biology

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