Center of Excellence Grant to Build Medical Record Surveillance System

On Sept. 28, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awarded a $4.5 million grant to build a CDC Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics to a consortium of Boston-based groups. The participating organizations, which include the HMS–Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program at the Harvard–MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, will build a private, secure, electronic medical records search system.

“The idea is to build a model system that can be adopted by health systems across the country,” explained co–principal investigator Richard Platt, chair of the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention. Kenneth Mandl, co–principal investigator and HMS assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s, said, “The software solutions and systems that we create will be something that can be widely disseminated, readily adopted, and open to all.”

The center will initially focus on two projects, the first dealing with clinician–public health interactions, which will be led by Platt. He and his team will create medical-record software to allow secure communication between doctors and public health officials. Initially, they will focus on asthma and sexually transmitted diseases, but will eventually address other medical conditions.

The other branch of the project will work to advance patient-controlled health records and will be led by Mandl. He and his colleagues will test these electronic records as a three-way communication tool among patients, clinicians, and public health officials. Although it will eventually apply to a range of health conditions, the initial focus will be on improving influenza immunization rates in high-risk populations. There will be a link with a state immunization registry as part of this effort.

For the past few years, many of the investigators on this new grant have also worked to build a model syndromic surveillance system so health officials can more rapidly identify a possible biological terrorist attack. This system is already in place, but it is in a continual state of refinement. The CDC grant will allow the investigators to extend their work to new conditions and to focus on longstanding problems that can be addressed using electronic medical records.

The grant is part of the CDC’s Health Protection Research Initiative, which funds research that could produce science-based recommendations that may be adopted by health departments, health care professionals, employers, and policymakers.

top