Development and Evaluation of a Regional Health Information Exchange (HIE)-Based Platform for Population-Level Infectious Disease Surveillance
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Background Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) offer a potential resource for timely, population-level infectious disease surveillance by integrating electronic health record data across healthcare systems. Methods We developed an end-to-end informatics pipeline for near-real-time community-level health surveillance based in a regional HIE serving Southeast Texas. We identified deidentified individual-level COVID-19, influenza, and RSV cases using diagnosis codes and laboratory results and assessed demographic and temporal trends from January 2022 through August 2026. Results We identified 492,242 COVID-19 cases, 343,977 influenza cases, and 33,159 RSV cases during the study period. Surveillance data captured expected seasonal patterns, including recurring winter COVID-19 and influenza peaks and shifting RSV epidemiology, while enabling monitoring of laboratory test positivity metrics and hospitalization trends across age groups. Conclusions HIE-based surveillance provides scalable, near-real-time monitoring of disease targets across large populations. HIE infrastructure can enhance public health situational awareness and complement traditional surveillance systems by harmonizing vital health data across systems and providers and delivering timely, standardized, and representative population health indicators.
Source: medRxiv
Language: English
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7220682345