Tag: electronic health records

For years, public health agencies have relied on paper-based case report forms to supplement the electronic laboratory reports (ELRs) they receive for reportable diseases. While ELRs provide positive test results, the accompanying case reports give public health agencies critical clinical, demographic, and risk factor data needed for effective disease investigation and response. However, the sheer volume of COVID-19 cases quickly overwhelmed this manual, paper-based process. Prior to the pandemic, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed standards for an electronic case report (eCR) form that could be automatically sent to public health agencies from providers’ electronic health records (EHRs).

The European Health Data Space (EHDS) will establish a common framework and infrastructure for the use of health data for research, innovation, policy-making, and regulatory activities in the European Union (EU). It will also create common standards and practices enabling EU citizens to better access, control, and share their electronic personal health data. Read this post to learn why Amazon Web Services (AWS) welcomes the EHDS as an important step towards unleashing the vast potential of health data to benefit citizens across Europe and beyond.

During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, health agencies stood up new solutions, augmented their epidemiologic data with other data sources, or looked to their local Health information Exchange (HIE) for support. In this blog post, we highlight four states where innovative HIEs are using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help public health agencies overcome their data challenges.

The advent of cloud technology, coupled with advances in fields like epidemiology, genomics, and data analytics, has led to transformational change in how we use data in health. These developments enable a data-driven approach in individual care, public health, and health-related research.

Cloud technology provides an opportunity to think differently about the electronic health record (EHR) to provide continuous, superior patient care. A patient’s health is not static, and a health record system is not static. Healthcare leaders should consider shifting the underlying words of EHR from “electronic” to “elastic,” embracing a record that is always in motion. AWS can help support this elasticity.

The Newfoundland and Labrador Centre for Health Information (NLCHI) provides quality information to health professionals, the public, researchers, and health system decision makers. Through collaboration with the health system, NLCHI supports the development of data and technical standards, maintains key health databases, carries out analytics and evaluation, and supports health research. This post details how NLCHI is able to provide secure and scalable access to their on-premises provincial electronic health record (EHR) system, by trusted and authorized partners who run on AWS, through the use of AWS PrivateLink, Network Load Balancer, and AWS Site-to-Site VPN.