Electronic Health Record (EHR) Interoperability with the Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR)

Project start date and end date: September 1, 2010 - Present

Background:
For over a decade, immunization providers have had the capability to send information electronically to the Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR) regarding vaccination doses administered by their practices. Recent initiatives by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) have focused on enabling such transfers to take place in real-time through automated connections between practices' electronic health record (EHR) systems and the MCIR using transactions conforming to industry-standard HL7 messages. The same standards-based messaging approach can be used to send a patient's complete vaccine history from MCIR to practices' EHRs to achieve bidirectional interoperability. Enabling such standards-based exchanges between EHRs and MCIR will enable wide participation by practices, permitting information for all vaccine doses to be available for immediate use in both systems in real time.

Objectives:
This project aims to evaluate MCIR data quality following the initiation of electronic immunization data exchange using real-time HL7 messaging from EHRs.  We will assess the timeliness, completeness, and accuracy of data transfers to and from MCIR.

Research Topics & Methods:
This project will be an evaluation that will assess and characterize changes in electronic reporting to MCIR on the following parameters:

• Across several primary care practices and retail pharmacies with a diversity of sites included, varying on the following characteristics: geographic region of MI, EHR vendor products, health system affiliation, and health information exchanges
• Changes relative to the reporting method used prior to HL7 including manual keyboard entry or electronic file transfer
• Data from MCIR databases collected to assess and characterize changes in immunization data quality metrics including doses reported among both children and adults

Implications:
This evaluation will allow for the identification of opportunities for improvement in electronic reporting to MCIR that will help facilitate the statewide implementation of real-time, bi-directional interoperability between EHRs and MCIR. This interoperability has the capacity to bring improvements in completeness, timeliness, and accuracy of data which will help clinicians and researchers to better utilize the information for their work.

Funder:
The project is funded by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).