Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

As the U.S. government has made enormous efforts to remove barriers for socially disadvantaged populations, more attention has been given to reducing the gap in health status due to the disparity issues in healthcare.  To this end, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services encourages healthcare service providers across sectors as well as schools to collaborate on facilitating health programs, such as education, surveillance, training and workforce development, and sharing resources to provide equitable and comprehensive health services to the disadvantaged.

     The rapidly advancing information technology has dramatically influenced creating, processing, disseminating, and utilizing information and data.  Achieving the “meaningful use” of health data through the nationwide use of health information technology (HIT) has become an important goal, from building the infrastructure to creating an HIT network such as an electronic health record (EHR) system.  One of the primary objectives of meaningful use set by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is to reduce health disparities and to minimize unequal distribution of social, political, economic, and environmental resources by using an HIT network.  Such advancing HIT tools have been developed to help healthcare providers, including local health departments, public and private hospitals, research institutes, community-based organizations, and schools, collaborate to solve the disparity problems by sharing health-related information and data.  Therefore, this study is timely research that investigates whether HIT is effective in helping local health departments achieve the goal of meaningful use at Stage 3, which aims to produce improved outcomes through the use of an HIT network.  

     The research attempts to answer the following questions: 1) How effective is an HIT network in aiding local health departments to reduce the health disparities among population groups?; and 2) In what activities have local health departments engaged to address health disparity issues with the use of an HIT network?

     The study employs the 2013 National Profile of Local Health Departments datasets administered by the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) to examine the impact of a health information technology network on addressing health disparity issues.  The empirical analysis is expected to identify the patterns of collaboration among local health departments and activities to address the health disparity issues.  In addition, the assessment would allow creating a typology of local health departments that actively, or less actively, engage in resolving the disparity issues by varying degrees of HIT network use.

     The study would provide empirical evidence of whether an HIT network promotes local health departments’ participation in collaborative governance to lower barriers for the disadvantaged.  Most importantly, the research would evaluate whether the advanced HIT meets the goal of meaningful use of health data, thereby increasing more robust research data on health systems and collaboration for improved population health outcomes.