Barriers to Leveraging Valuable Health Data for Collaborative Patient Care: How Will We Integrate Family Health Histories?

We sought to incorporate a community-based solution with a family health history (FHH) clinical support program (MeTree) integrated into well-patient appointments with the novel partnership of a public health state-level health information exchange (HIE). The Arkansas—Making History pilot project tested informatics compatibility among these systems and the patients’ electronic medical record (EPIC) in a rural clinic in the north central region of the state, having the state HIE as a means for patients to store and share their FHHs across multiple healthcare providers with updates in real time. We monitored for unexpected issues during the pilot and asked for the perspectives of patients and healthcare providers throughout the project to have a clear understanding of how to implement this project on a larger scale. The greatest barrier to project implementation was the inability of the state HIE to host or share the FHH data. We compensated for the lack of systems compatibility and documented valuable information about patient acceptability and usability of the MeTree platform, as well as gleaning important clinical outcome data from those who completed MeTree FHH accounts in an underserved area. Rural patients need additional technological support in the larger scaling of this project, both in available linkages to community clinics with patient-controlled options for how their data is stored and shared and in Internet connectivity and software options available for ease of use.