Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are patient-centered records system that bring together key information about a patient’s health to enable data-driven, comprehensive care delivery. EHR systems can be used to efficiently collect data in a format that can be shared across multiple health care organizations and leveraged for quality improvement, prevention activities, and public health reporting. The ability for the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) to obtain a comprehensive, interoperable EHR solution that will facilitate the collection of clinical, laboratory, billing, scheduling, and other health related information is a critical need.

This need has been further accentuated by the COVID-19 public health response. The lack of a robust and integrated technical infrastructure impacted health outcomes leading to a higher likelihood of missed opportunities in timely public health interventions such as testing and contact tracing. EHR systems can not only help with a pandemic response but can be a powerful tool to assess and improve population health outcomes as well through real-time reporting and data analysis.

VDH is seeking to identify a solution to replace its legacy patient demographic and billing system (WebVISION). The agency seeks to interface with existing single programmatic solutions such as the Virginia Information Immunization System (VIIS) and serve as the main repository of information across multiple clinical services programs including women’s health, maternity, STD, HIV, TB, and immunization. This solution will offer strong data analytics for improving public health outcomes, comply with patient safety and regulatory standards, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996. The goal is to deploy this capability across 120 clinic sites to serve over 250,000 patients or 400,000 clinical encounters per year.

Through the use of an EHR system and health information exchanges (HIE), VDH can leverage health information technology to efficiently collect and share data, reduce cost, improve emergency response, and make more timely diagnosis of health conditions that improve not only individual health, but also impacts population health across our in communities in the Commonwealth.