State and Local Initiatives to Expand Access to Health Center and Health Care System Data

There is a growing health information exchange movement across community health centers nationally, yet there continues to be major challenges and fragmentation in the information technology environment. The Michigan Primary Care Association (MPCA) hosts a data warehouse that includes data on care delivery processes and health outcomes collected from over 100 health centers in 24 states for patients with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and depression. Findings suggest significant potential exists if the data can be used to create performance measures that are tailored to each center's needs, operating environment, and population served, and if the comparative and inter-facility reporting is made available. However, researchers caution performance data alone is insufficient for meaningful quality improvement; performance analysis and consideration of state policy influences are essential. Current MPCA state and local coordinated efforts across health centers seeks to build towards a shared vision for a national health center quality of care data warehouses that can lead to practice transformation -- a multi-center, multi-state project which aims to build a regional data repository that integrates all health centers regardless of the applications, records systems or registries used. MPCA has also found that most EHR's available in the market do not provide a population health focused “registry” function, and lack true clinical decision support (CDS) capabilities when it comes to incorporating evidence-based medicine to ensure appropriate intervention at the point-of-care.