With higher EHR adoption rates across healthcare, more patient data is flowing into provider systems that can be used to inform public health agencies about community-specific illnesses.
Researchers with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the NYU School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health teamed up with health IT developers to build an EHR surveillance tool called NYC Macroscope. Using data from a subset of 700 primary care practices throughout New York City, researchers showed that analyzing EHR data is just as accurate at measuring the prevalence of chronic illnesses as traditional methods like in-person examination surveys and telephone surveys.
