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Overview

Validating data from Health IT systems is the cornerstone of effective Health IT Enabled QI. Ensuring that Health IT-generated reports and data reflect an accurate picture of the care and outcomes of your population ensures that data is actionable for quality improvement, monitoring as well as many other purposes. This validation must be ongoing as system , provider, workflow, and other changes, can all impact accuracy of data. This section provides worksheets, guides, and tips for validating data.

Data Accuracy Resources
Health Center Health IT Emergency Response Resources

Health Center Health IT Emergency Response Resources

Updated January 2025

Ready to take the next step towards enhanced IT preparedness? The resources linked below, organized by topic, share actionable strategies that health centers can implement to move towards greater resilience.

Preserving access to Electronic Health Record (EHR) data

Preventing cyber-attacks

  • The HITEQ Center’s Guide to Essential Cybersecurity Tasks For Health Centers with Limited Resources provides a baseline of day-to-day tasks that health center IT and compliance staff should consider to protect their systems and comply with regulatory requirements. These include strategies to prevent successful phishing attacks, limit unnecessary physical and virtual access to systems, and keep security patches up to date. 
  • The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), in collaboration with the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), developed a downloadable Security Risk Assessment Tool to help guide you through the process.

Responding to cyber-attacks

  • Federal cybersecurity organizations such as the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) actively publish risk management frameworks and incident response plans, including one specific to ransomware, that can be leveraged by health centers when developing incident response plans.
  • The U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Guide for Cybersecurity Event Recovery describes the contents of a typical cyber-attack recovery plan and includes a checklist of items (a “playbook”) that should be implemented as part of the recovery process. 

Leveraging EHR data for patient outreach

  • The HITEQ Center’s “Accessing Your Data: Questions to consider with your Electronic Health Record Vendor,” is a checklist that can be used to talk with vendors about how health centers use EHR system capabilities for activities such as report generation. Relevant questions include 1) whether data, including reports, can be accessed from any location at any time; 2) whether and how your practice can generate ad hoc reports; and 3) whether it is possible to query the EHR to identify certain patients, for example, those with particular conditions, using particular medications, or in a particular geography.
  • Some EHR enhancers, such as Relevant’s Data Explorer, enable health centers to use the EHR to build reports without writing code and automate text messaging to subsets of patients.
  • The National Association of Community Health Center’s Heat-Related Illness Management in EHR Systems contains methods for integrating heat-related illness alerts into EHRs. 
  • Resources like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Heat and Medications and Americares' Climate Resilience for Frontline Clinics Toolkit can inform what information to include in patient outreach.

Sharing data with emergency response entities to prevent or mitigate a serious or imminent threat

Sharing data with other healthcare providers to support care continuity

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Acknowledgements

This resource collection was compiled by the HITEQ Center staff with guidance from HITEQ Advisory Committee members and collaborators of the HITEQ Center.