PHII Voices
Keep up with projects, views and news from PHII.
Categories
NYC Macroscope: Using EHRs to Monitor Population Health
Shawn Eastridge
In an effort to determine how public health can use EHRs to analyze population health trends, New York City is developing the NYC Macroscope, a population health surveillance system that uses EHRs to track chronic conditions managed by primary care practices. The NYC Macroscope guide, Developing an Electronic Health Record-Based Population Health Surveillance System, outlines the methods that will be used to gather and analyze EHR data on priority health indicators such as chronic disease risk factors, prevalence, treatment, and control.

This project comes at a critical time as our healthcare system moves towards full EHR adoption, and the partnership between public health and healthcare continues to grow. Public health practitioners need to be able to point to specific data that accurately reflects population health trends in order to influence health policy changes and implement disease prevention strategies within communities. Traditionally, public health relies heavily on expensive and time-intensive surveys to gather meaningful population health data, but with the current rate of EHR implementation, public health has timely access to a wealth of population health data. The NYC Macroscope project seeks to validate that EHRs can provide public health practitioners with timely, meaningful data, leading to more timely interventions and policy action.

Part 3: Sustaining IIS modernization: building the future beyond implementation
PHII's IIS team offers practical approaches for sustaining IIS modernization beyond implementation by strengthening workforce capabilities, future-visioning, communicating value, and building agency capacity for long-term success.
Read More >
Part 2: Best practices for successful IIS data modernization implementation
Our IIS team shares key recommendations for successful IIS modernization, including using assessments, partner engagement, change management and data governance to align with broader public health goals.
Read More >
Part 1: IIS modernization: what’s different this time around?
PHII's IIS team examines strategies to help public health agencies shift IIS modernization from purely technical upgrades to a comprehensive approach that involves people, processes, governance, and system-wide transformation.
Read More >
Reflecting on 2025: the great reset in public health
PHII Director Vivian Singletary shares her reflections on the past year and looks forward to what 2026 holds.
Read More >
Using generative AI to automate pediatric audiology diagnoses
Our audiology team shares about a system built to leverage generative artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the classification of pediatric audiology reports.
Read More >
The importance of governance in data modernization
Senior informatics analyst Sarah Shaw reflects on last year's Data Modernization Boot Camp and how it spawned their online Data Governance course.
Read More >
Reflections on 2024 and looking forward to the new year
PHII Director Vivian Singletary celebrates our 2024 public health wins and gets ready for the opportunities and challenges in the new year.
Read More >
How Fairfax County’s health department tackled data modernization challenges
In this video, Fairfax County Health Department shared how they’ve tackled various data modernization challenges.
Read More >
Communication plays a key role in successful data modernization planning
Shawn Eastridge provides examples of public health jurisdictions emphasizing how communication is key to a successful data modernization plan.
Read More >
A use case in IIS considerations for DMI, from Michigan
The Michigan Care Improvement Registry (MCIR) team offers an example of considerations immunization information system (IIS) teams may have when working to align with data modernization goals.
Read More >