On November 14-15, 2017, Mike Berry from HLN, with the Rhode Island Department of Health, attended the CDC Early Hearing Detection and Intervention (EHDI) Grantee Meeting in Atlanta. The meeting featured EHDI programs from
states and territories across the U.S., along with national experts in areas of hearing screening and diagnostic audiology as well as epidemiology, public health informatics, health outcomes and program evaluation.
Much of the meeting focused on the purpose and strategies of the current cooperative agreement between CDC and state EHDI programs. Similar to the Immunization Information System (IIS) Functional Standards in our IIS work, EHDI has its own set of EHDI Information System (EHDI-IS) Functional Standards; and the cooperative agreement is assisting grantees to meet those standards, as well as to evaluate their progress towards those and other program goals. There were also technical sessions on data linkage, tracking and surveillance; and group activities in which states shared their strategies on topics such as data exchange, stakeholder outreach, and program evaluation. Rhode Island is unique in that its EHDI-IS is part of KIDSNET, the state’s integrated child health information system; and at the meeting, we shared our recent experience deploying EHDI reports in KIDSNET to a wide variety of EHDI-related providers; as well as our current initiative to establish data exchange with audiologists’ Electronic Health Record Systems (EHR-S) for diagnostic audiology encounters.
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