OKLAHOMA CITY – The Oklahoma State Department of Health (OSDH) and MyHealth Access Network, an Oklahoma non-profit health information exchange (HIE), today announced a partnership aimed at enhancing tracking and reporting of the deployment of vaccinations including COVID-19 vaccines, as well as providing valuable public health data and analytics to the public health officials of Oklahoma.
With federal grant support from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, MyHealth will create and validate a data feed to the Oklahoma State Immunization Information System (OSIIS) to enable the flow of immunization data from consenting MyHealth partners into the vaccine registry. This new data feed will also enable the flow of immunization records and gaps back to MyHealth and its healthcare participants.
“The new feed from MyHealth will reduce the burden on providers – especially smaller providers – who want to share their vaccine data with the state,” said Secretary of Health and Mental Health Kevin Corbett. “That, in turn, will increase the accuracy and timeliness of the state’s vaccine data and ultimately support more informed public health decisions and policy-making.”
Additionally, the new partnership will facilitate and support the ongoing COVID vaccine roll-out in Oklahoma by enabling providers to know which of their patients have been vaccinated and which have not.
“Health care providers are some of the most important and influential voices when it comes to educating Oklahomans about the benefits of the vaccine,” said MyHealth CEO Dr. David Kendrick. “They can be better partners in that effort if they know which of their patients are fully inoculated, which need an additional booster, and which are unvaccinated. Getting that information in real-time is one more tool in the toolbox that MyHealth provides to fight COVID-19 and to prepare ourselves for the next pandemic.”
MyHealth will also provide valuable data analytics back to the OSDH and to its participating providers. MyHealth has already been working with Commissioner of Health Keith Reed to monitor the impact of vaccinations on COVID-19 spread, ER and inpatient admissions, and death in Oklahoma. This expanded partnership will allow MyHealth to support public health officials in making timely, critical decisions needed to protect the health of Oklahomans.
The data sharing agreement between OSDH and MyHealth was signed in November 2021. MyHealth has already begun to include immunization reporting in its regular meetings with the State as well as public briefings provided at noon on Thursdays and other press settings. The live data feeds, dashboards and reports are expected to be available between now and June of 2022.