Welcome to the Bureau of Health Informatics (BHI)
Our Mission
To inform and facilitate efforts to improve the health of Louisiana communities through strategic collection, analysis and presentation of available population health, health care and health indicator data.
How BHI intends to fulfill its mission:
- Collaboration through strategic data analysis, improved data sharing, data integration and technology infrastructure that promotes interoperability and reduces insularity in health data systems
- Healthcare quality improvement support through targeted outreach activities like data presentation, focused analysis, GIS hot-spotting and other data visualization techniques
- Access to our work in a quality, timely, and innovative manner
The application and dissemination of informatics knowledge and expertise to public health professionals is the key to unlocking the potential of information systems to improve the health of the residents of Louisiana. The Bureau serves as the hub for many OPH-wide data and informatics efforts, coordinating legislative mandates for reporting, managing Meaningful Use for Public Health, providing data and visualization services, managing the Electronic Health Records system for the parish health clinics, and other Office-wide and external efforts and partnerships.
- Louisiana Health Care Databases Project
- Consumer Right to Know
- Electronic Health Records system for parish health units
- Opioid Surveillance Initiative
- Meaningful use reporting for public health
- Electronic Laboratory Data, Immunizations, Syndromic Surveillance
- Population health analytics
- Data visualization/mapping, data reporting
- Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS)
- Epidemiology for Vital Statistics and Chronic Disease
- Cross-program data analysis and data sharing
- External collaboration with partners in health-related organizations
- Health data policy
BHI is also designed as the hub through which OPH becomes more engaged with the rest of the health care community and the public. BHI will drive overall data policy to support the agency's capacity to manage and use data to optimize operations and perform coordinated analytics to advance core public health functions:
- Serve as a collaboration hub for data staff working in programs /sections across the agency
- Convene epidemiologists and program leaders to strategize agency-wide analytic priorities and approaches
- Regularly convene epidemiologists and data analysts for robust skill building activities
- Strengthen the caliber of analytics used to guide the agency's activities
- Support adoption of key advanced analytic methods to be used across the agency
- Provide or coordinate technical assistance for advanced analytics
- GIS/spatial analytics
- SAS & STATA
- Provide or coordinate technical assistance with SMEs for appropriate use of population data sets
- National data sources (i.e. US Census, American Community Survey, etc.)
- Louisiana data (i.e. such as Vital Records, Medicaid, LaHIDD)
- Make it easier for programs to get or share data where appropriate
- Maintain agreements for data sharing and provide consultation on permitted uses
- Collaborate with ethics & IRB
- Work with SME's to identify and develop the "datasets of truth" for analytics
- Support technical needs
- Coordinate and support the implementation of OPH electronic health records and meaningful use activities
- Work with LDH IT to assure appropriate technology resources (hardware/software) for data staff
- Strengthen public access to agency data
- Work with agency and program leadership to prioritize the data that should be available to the public
- Develop strategies to "liberate" public health knowledge gained from analytics when appropriate and to making "public use" datasets available
For questions about our website, please contact Nell Wilson, BHI Operations Manager, at nell.wilson@la.gov.