In an article just sent to me, comes further evidence that there are those seeking to tie school record systems to healthcare and other data systems. Utah’s P20W, federally funded, statewide longitudinal database, tracks our children from preschool through grade 20 and into the workforce. Marrying disparate database systems has long been a goal of central planners to know everything about everyone. Here’s a link to this article and the relevant point.

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David Nash, M.D., founding dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Penn., is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the task facing the healthcare industry as it moves to population health management models. He shared some of his insights with Health Data Management recently.

http://www.healthdatamanagement.com/news/Registries-Key-to-Population-Health-Management-48202-1.html

Registries Key to Population Health Management

HDM: In a recent talk, you mentioned that data from so many sources that are not healthcare providers will have to be pulled in to properly serve the population served by Medicaid ACOs.

Nash: That’s the next stage. We are going to see the beginnings of promoting big data for population-based health analytics, and we recognize data systems concerning housing, poverty, smoking, and school attendance, just to name a few, all need to be connected.