{"id":80307,"date":"2013-07-12T07:55:45","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T11:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=80307"},"modified":"2013-07-19T12:26:55","modified_gmt":"2013-07-19T16:26:55","slug":"using-data-to-improve-the-health-and-lives-of-state-residents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/07\/using-data-to-improve-the-health-and-lives-of-state-residents\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Data to Improve the Health – and Lives – of State Residents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Connecticut invests billions of dollars annually in providing health and human services to state residents. But are those funds being allocated in such a way as to have the greatest possible effect on residents\u2019 health and well-being? That\u2019s one of the major questions the University of Connecticut Health Center and its partners aim to answer through the work of the Connecticut Health Information Network<\/a>, or CHIN.<\/p>\n

CHIN is a suite of sophisticated applications and algorithms that brings together health data from several state agencies, including the Departments of Public Health, Developmental Services, and Children and Families. It is spearheaded by UConn Health\u2019s Center for Public Health and Health Policy<\/a>, UConn\u2019s Departments of Computer Sciences and Engineering, and Boston-based medical informatics firm OpenClinica LLC. It\u2019s conducted in collaboration with representatives from participating state agencies. The state legislature created CHIN in 2007 and continues to provide funding as the initiative progresses.<\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>
Robert H. Aseltine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CHIN focuses on collecting and analyzing data from state agencies to see what programs, services and treatments yield the best outcomes for people those agencies serve. According to Robert Aseltine<\/a>, director of the Institute for Public Health Research at the Health Center and a professor in the Division of Behavioral Science and Community Health, \u201cThe ultimate goal of CHIN is to foster better government by improving the allocation of resources and creating efficiencies in programs that address health and human service problems. Ultimately we\u2019re trying to improve population health by making better use of data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breaking down data ‘silos’<\/h2>\n

State agencies that focus on health and social issues maintain data on the individuals they serve. Each agency, however, stores the data in its own system. With data existing in separate \u201csilos\u201d and no common numeric identifier associated with an individual, it\u2019s been extremely difficult to use cross-agency data to assemble a clear picture of how shared clients are faring. \u201cFor example,\u201d says Aseltine, \u201cfamilies receiving financial benefits from the state typically have children who are attending school and receiving daycare services and publicly funded health care, yet there is virtually no coordination among these programs. Coordinating these benefits and services so that we maximize their effectiveness is in everyone\u2019s interest, but it is not possible without the ability to share data across programs and agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

CHIN has addressed this obstacle by developing special software that takes data from all the agencies and uses a \u201cprobabilistic\u201d approach to assemble relevant information about individual clients. The system, Aseltine says, \u201cmakes it easy and straightforward to be able to integrate data across agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Improving public health<\/h2>\n

The data CHIN extracts has wide-ranging implications for public health. It can be analyzed to compare patient outcomes in order to identify best practices for managing patients with diabetes, for example, and reduce rates of hospitalization among people with chronic diseases. Recent data suggest that patients covered by Medicaid and Medicare have much higher rates of hospital readmission. \u00a0Aseltine says CHIN\u2019s data may be useful in linking those patients to other sources of health care in the community, so that they receive the care they need without costly hospital readmissions.<\/p>\n

\"Dr.<\/a>
Dr. Bruce Gould<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Both federal legislation and trends in health care reimbursement make data collection especially critical, says Dr. Bruce Gould<\/a>, associate dean for primary health care at the UConn Health Center and medical director of both the Burgdorf Health Center and Hartford\u2019s Department of Health and Human Services. \u201cIf you look at where the health system is going with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and with many of our health systems looking at accountable care organizations, it will be all about managing the care of populations<\/i> of patients,\u201d Gould says. \u201cOne cannot ever hope to do that without robust population data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Data can also shed light on environmental and social factors that affect a person\u2019s health and well-being. Does the person live in an area where there\u2019s no access to primary care services? This could be rectified to ensure access to care. Is public safety lacking in the person\u2019s neighborhood? Resources could be targeted to improve safety and reduce risk. If a patient being discharged from the hospital is going home to an unsafe environment, it\u2019s important to know that, says Aseltine. \u201cIf we\u2019re about promoting health, we have to take the broader social and physical environment into consideration. The vast majority of people\u2019s lives are lived outside a medical institution, and that environment, not hospitals and physicians\u2019 offices, is the primary determinant of overall health and well-being.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the public health perspective, Gould says, \u201cIn order to optimize the health of the residents of a place like Hartford, you need data across populations that can be used to drill down to specific neighborhoods and census tracts to identify unmet needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the technology to integrate and analyze data now in place, CHIN participants are making plans to deploy the initiative later this year. They are meeting regularly to work on issues such as governance, policies on data access and management, approval mechanisms and more. \u201cOur goal is to develop a deployment plan and execute it,\u201d Aseltine says. \u201cWe want to get this thing up and running.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Follow\u00a0the UConn Health Center<\/a> on\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,\u00a0Twitter<\/a> and\u00a0YouTube<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Connecticut Health Information Network collects data from state agencies to analyze what offers the best outcomes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":80359,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[45],"class_list":["post-80307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uconn-health","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-02 18:44:01","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80307"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80923,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80307\/revisions\/80923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/80359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80307"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=80307"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=80307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}