Health Affairs Today: Using EHR to Boost Vaccination Rates in Unhoused or Incarcerated People in Minnesota

Compared to the rest of the population, vaccination rates are much lower amongst Minnesotans who are unhoused or in the penitentiary system. To help close the gap, a team of researchers developed a set of tools to guide and compare interventions enacted to reduce health disparities. The work, published in the latest issue of Health Affairs, was a collaboration between the Minnesota Department of Health and 11 health systems that pooled data into the Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium (MNEHRC).

According to the authors, “The MNEHRC developed a distributed data model with linkages to statewide data and the ability to deduplicate records. Each site analyzes its data locally and generates summary reports that are then aggregated centrally. This approach allows the group to assess trends and disparities in COVID-19 prevalence, testing, and vaccination, including among key subgroups at high risk of COVID-19 and severe disease, without a central data repository.”

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(Source: Health Affairs Today, June 14^th, 2022)