Electronic Health Record (EHR)-Based Community Health Measures: An Exploratory Assessment of Perceived Usefulness by Local Health Departments

• Published in: BMC public health 2018-05, Vol.18 (1), p.647-647, Article 647
• Main Authors: Comer, Karen F, Gibson, P Joseph, Zou, Jian, Rosenman, Marc, Dixon, Brian E
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Community health assessment; Community health measure; Community health services; Departments; Electronic health record; Electronic health records; Electronic medical records; Health care; Health informatics; Health information exchange; Information science; Information systems; Management; Medical personnel; Medical records; Mortality; Outcome and process assessment (Medical care); Polls & surveys; Population; Population health; Population statistics; Public health; Questionnaires; R&D; Research & development; Studies; Technology Acceptance Model; Variance analysis; Workers
• ISSN: 1471-2458; 1471-2458
• DOI: 10.1186/s12889-018-5550-2

Given the widespread adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems in health care organizations, public health agencies are interested in accessing EHR data to improve health assessment and surveillance. Yet there exist few examples in the U.S. of governmental health agencies using EHR data routinely to examine disease prevalence and other measures of community health. The objective of this study was to explore local health department (LHD) professionals' perceptions of the usefulness of EHR-based community health measures, and to examine these perceptions in the context of LHDs' current access and use of sub-county data, data aggregated at geographic levels smaller than county. To explore perceived usefulness, we conducted an online survey of LHD professionals in Indiana. One hundred and thirty-three (133) individuals from thirty-one (31) LHDs participated. The survey asked about usefulness of specific community health measures as well as current access to and uses of sub-county population health data. Descriptive statistics were calculated to examine respondents' perceptions, access, and use. A one-way ANOVA (with pairwise comparisons) test was used to compare average scores by LHD size. Respondents overall indicated moderate agreement on which community health measures might be useful. Perceived usefulness of specific EHR-based community health measures varied by size of respondent's LHD [F(3, 88) = 3.56, p = 0.017]. Over 70% of survey respondents reported using community health data, but of those