Researchers from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis have received a $200,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to determine if electronic health record data can be used to measure health needs of Marion County residents for public health planning purposes.
The goal of the project is to locate areas within the county most in need of certain public health programs by using the smaller data samples found in hospitals' EHR systems, as opposed to the countywide data currently used for public health planning.
"When there is a limited budget for, say, preventing diabetes, the county health department has to determine how to spend its resources," said Brian Dixon, PhD, the study's principal investigator and an assistant professor of health informatics in the IU School of Informatics and Computing at IUPUI, in a news release. "One choice is to evenly divide the money across all communities within the county, some of which probably don't have as much need as others. A second choice is to identify specific areas within the county that might need intervention the most."
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