title: An evaluation of the rates of repeat notifiable disease reporting and patient crossover using a health information exchange-based automated electronic laboratory reporting system.
abstract: Patients move across healthcare organizations and utilize services with great frequency and variety. This fact impacts both health information technology policy and patient care. To understand the challenges faced when developing strategies for effective health information exchange, it is important to understand patterns of patient movement and utilization for many healthcare contexts, including managing public-health notifiable conditions. We studied over 10 years of public-health notifiable diseases using the nation's most comprehensive operational automatic electronic laboratory reporting system to characterize patient utilization patterns. Our cohort included 412,699 patients and 833,710 reportable cases. 11.3% of patients had multiple notifiable case reports, and 19.5% had notifiable disease data distributed across 2 or more institutions. This evidence adds to the growing body of evidence that patient data resides in many organizations and suggests that to fully realize the value of HIT in public health, cross-organizational data sharing must be meaningfully incentivized.
authors.affiliation: Regenstrief Institute, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Judy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gichoya
authors.forename: Roland E
authors.initials: RE
authors.lastname: Gamache
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Vreeman
authors.forename: Brian E
authors.initials: BE
authors.lastname: Dixon
authors.forename: John T
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Finnell
authors.forename: Shaun
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Grannis
mesh_terms: D002984:Clinical Laboratory Information Systems; D003141:Communicable Diseases; D018563:Disease Notification; D063025:Health Information Management; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics; D011159:Population Surveillance; D011634:Public Health