Why Aren’t We Using HIEs to Support Vaccination Efforts (and Everything Else)? w/ Niam Yaraghi - The #HCBiz Show

As of 2015 the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT had awarded $548 million in grants to states to establish health information exchanges (HIE). I have no doubt hundreds of millions of dollars more have been invested in various ways since then. So, when faced with one of the most daunting healthcare data challenges of our time in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, surely, we turned to the HIEs first. Right? Not so much, according to today’s guest.

Niam Yaraghi, assistant professor of Business Technology at Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami and a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, recently explored the use of HIEs in vaccination efforts across the country. He tells us that “While the U.S. employed every possible resource to develop the vaccines, we are neglecting to use the best available information technologies to efficiently distribute them”.

In Yaraghi’s recent article, co-authored with Brookings Institution colleague Peter Levin, they share that none of the state vaccination plans they reviewed made any mention of using HIEs to support the effort. Further, they found no correlation between a state’s vaccination success and the existence of a robust HIE infrastructure in that state.