The eHealth Exchange, https://www.ehealthexchange.org a large health information network, connecting federal agencies and providers, has announced the first go-live COVID 19 Electronic Case Reporting (eCR) with the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) https://www.aphl.org and OCHIN. https://www.ochin.org.
The eHealth Exchange network enables automated generation and transmission of case reports from EHRs to necessary public health agencies while increasing accuracy but at the same time, reduces the reporting burden for providers.
“The new electronic case reporting allows network participants to automatically report relevant health information to public health agencies via the eHealth Exchange,” said Jay Nakashima, Executive Director of eHealth Exchange. “We’ve been working hard with APHL to bring this to life and hope it eases the process for providers and health information networks reporting COVID-19 data and other reportable conditions to their local, state, and federal agencies.”
OCHIN, a nonprofit healthcare innovation center, is the first eHealth Exchange network participant to enable case reporting across 20 states in their network. OCHIN in leveraging the eHealth Exchange to support electronic case reporting requirements for communitiesdisproportionately impacted by COVID-19, saw the potential for population health throughother disease notifications using public health reporting.
In addition to providing this service to their own network participants, which includes 75% of all hospitals in the U.S. The eHealth Exchange is providing this service at no cost to all Carequality-enabled networks so they can contribute to the advancement of public health reporting.
This new capability to automatically generate and send case reports initially supports thereporting needs of the of the national COVID-19 pandemic response and expands support to more than 50 reportable diseases that APHL monitors.
While new data reporting protocols from the White House have redirected reporting situational awareness data from CDC to HHS, this situational awareness data is different from electronic case reporting to state and local public health agencies which is required by law in every state and territory. The states do use some of this case data that they receive in anonymized form and a separate process to send data to the CDC as well.