Public health agencies across the country continue to face new challenges, such as surveilling chronic and infectious diseases like the coronavirus and others. In addition to these challenges, health agencies now find themselves fighting the resurgence of infectious diseases due to an increase in unvaccinated children. According to the CDC, the number of reported measles cases in 2019 surpassed the previous record in 1992. More than 75 percent of the reported cases were linked to areas within New York state and were spread through groups of people who remain unvaccinated.

Electronic case reporting (eCR) is the automated generation and electronic submission of reportable diseases and conditions from an EHR to public health agencies. Each state has public health reporting requirements and relies on healthcare providers to report on certain conditions. Although the increased adoption and implementation of EHRs has dramatically improved the ability of providers to report conditions electronically, paper-based manual reporting remains pervasive.

Seeing a continued need for public health agencies to rely on healthcare providers to share relevant and timely information regarding reportable incidents, a forum called the Digital Bridge was created to bring together key decision makers from health IT, healthcare delivery entities, public health organizations, and other committed industry leaders.

Attend this session to learn how Digital Bridge creates a forum for these organizations to collaborate on technical solutions for a nationally standardized, sustainable approach to exchanging and using electronic health data. This initiative works to leverage a standards-based approach to bidirectional information exchange among healthcare stakeholders to ease administrative burden, as well as enable better informed clinicians regarding population health, environmental risks, and outbreaks.