The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) https://healthit.gov within HHS has announced that ONC will award nearly $20 million in funds available from the CARES Act for projects.
One of the goals is to build and expand ONC’s program Strengthening the Technical Advancement and Readiness of Public Health Agencies via Health Information Exchange (STAR HIE) to help communities improve health information sharing related to vaccinations.
Currently, there are about 100 HIE organizations in the U.S., reaching an estimated 92 percent of the U.S. populations, according to the Strategic Health Information Exchange Collaborative https://cdc.gov/ncird, the national trade association for HIEs.
In collaboration with HIEs, it would be possible to individually correlate every patient who has received the vaccine with all of their clinical data. Both pre and post vaccination data could offer more detailed insight into any adverse events and long term health outcomes that is currently possible.
The funding will help public health agencies obtain additional help tracking and identifying patients who have yet to receive their second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and better identify those who may be at high risk or who have not yet received a vaccination.
ONC will also award funds to the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) https://www.astho.org and the Colorado Regional Health Information Organization (CORHIO) https://www.corhio.org to support immunization related HIE collaborations.
Currently there are 63 immunization information systems across the U.S., one in each state, eight in territories, and five in cities which are funded in part through CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) https://cdc.gov/ncird.