Worcester, Mass., Health Data Exchange to Focus on Opioid Use Disorders

UMass Chan Medical School researchers are partnering with Worcester, Mass., officials and local healthcare organizations to share data for patients with opioid use disorders.

An Aug. 22 story on the Chan Medical School website details the initiative, known as the Worcester Integrated Health Data Exchange, which is designed to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of health inequities, trends, risk factors and outcomes.

The project is expected to launch in December with UMass Memorial Health and Family Health Center of Worcester. The city’s other healthcare organizations are expected to join after the initial rollout, the report said. 

“We know from state data for opioids that the highest numbers are for communities of color,” said Matilde “Mattie” Castiel, M.D., associate professor of medicine and Worcester’s commissioner of health and human services, who is spearheading the project. “Having our local Worcester data could help bring collaboration and resources to affected neighborhoods.”

The platform for sharing de-identified patient data, which will be converted into a common data model known as Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP), was developed by Adrian H. Zai, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., associate professor of population & quantitative health sciences and chief research informatics officer. 

Zai is also director of the Research Informatics Core, a joint venture between the UMass Center for Clinical & Translational Sciences and the Department of Population & Quantitative Health Sciences. The Research Informatics Core is supported by a grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Zai is quoted explaining why sharing electronic data across health access points in the city could improve community health. “You would know whether your patient ends up in the ER in different places, or if a patient is getting opioid medications in multiple places,” he explained. “And with demographic data, things like that would be quite revealing and data that we’ve never had before. Hopefully collecting data over time could help us understand the outcomes of certain interventions from a city perspective and where we should tackle challenges.”

Once the model of data sharing around a particular health problem such as opioid use is developed, it could be applied to other diseases such as diabetes or hypertension, he added.

This effort, which is supported by the National Institutes of Health and UMass Memorial Health, was born out of the collaborative model of care, outreach and data-sharing that took place during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic and formation of the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, the article states. With data in hand, the task force mobilized the community to target mobile testing and vaccination clinics to neighborhoods most in need.

With the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, the task force transitioned to the Worcester Health Equity Task Force, which is now co-chaired by Castiel and Victoria McCandless, chief of staff for UMass Memorial Health.