Mississippi Department of Health updating state health plan, creating unified system for analyzing data

• The State Health Officer also advised older Mississippians and those with chronic illnesses to get their flu and COVID shots as the season approaches.

The Rural Health Transformation Program is giving the Mississippi State Department of Health a reason to update the state’s health plan. 

State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney informed the State Board of Health on Wednesday that for the past four years the department has wanted to make the state’s health plan more effective by bringing it up to date.

While Edney clarified there is no additional funding coming, steps are underway to conduct a full assessment of the state’s healthcare system. The review will gather data that can be used by legislators and health professionals to close healthcare gaps. 

Department of Health Chief of Staff Laura Goodson said the areas the assessment will focus on include access to care, the current health of the population, system capacity, and sustainability. 

To identify those gaps, more than 300 health professionals across the state will be polled through a series of town hall meetings during the remainder of the month. That information will help develop the new health plan. 

“The final presentation will come up in April of next year, then we will turn that into a new version of the plan, which like Dr. Edney said, is pretty outdated,” Goodson said. 

The department is also working to establish a real-time system that can allow the health department to analyze information as it comes in. 

“This will be an instrument for health policy planning,” Edney described. 

The department is also in the process of securing proposals for the establishment of a statewide health data utility model. This real-time model will create a bi-directional health information exchange by connecting all of the providers. Edney said the new system, which will take about 18 months to build out, will allow providers to stay abreast of the various care their patients receive from any other provider across the state. 

A second part of that project will also create a centralized imaging repository for trauma care, which will cost about $3 million. 

“And so anybody working on those trauma patients will be able to pull those images out,” Edney said.

Compiling all billing data will be another component of that project, pooling data from three to four sources into one that the Health Department examines. 

Finally, the department is also developing an analytic platform to compile all of this new data.

“Y’all, we have a lot of data, but we don’t have the capacity to study it quickly and respond to things like the mortality crisis of 2024,” Edney explained.

Once all of those components are established, Edney said it will allow the department to determine what is causing health related issues in two to three weeks instead of two to three years. 

“It’s an utter game changer for those of us studying population health outcomes,” Edney said. 

Since that project is the procurement stage, Edney said he could not provide much more detail, but did add that the information gathered from this effort will provide forecasting data the state can use in predicting Medicaid budgets. 

Other Business

In other business, Edney advised all Mississippians to consider getting their flu and COVID shots as the season approaches, especially older residents and those with chronic illnesses. 

“COVID does impact older Mississippians and those with chronic conditions much harder,” Edney said. “But flu is right now much more dangerous and it is really the bug that we worry about.” 

Edney also spoke on another project underway aimed at providing residents with a method to easily search current food and other consumable recalls through the department’s website.

He said it is still under development but will be announced when it is complete and available to the public.