BUILDING BLOCKS STATE CASE STUDY #1: Adapting Tools and Lessons Learned from Other Public Health Programs

Minnesota Department of Health

BACKGROUND

The Newborn Screening (NBS) Program at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) began implementing electronic reporting of demographic information and point-of-care screening results in all birth hospitals in 2014. For this large project, we needed to track 91 different hospitals who were in various stages of engagement or onboarding.

PROBLEM

Tracking contacts, project deliverables, status updates, and meeting notes for each hospital or health care system was too complicated for our SharePoint site and network drive. Our team struggled with communication internally.

SOLUTION

We were put in contact with other programs in our agency who were actively onboarding health care systems for electronic reporting. They had adapted our agency’s IT project and ticket tracking software (JIRA) for their specific project needs. We were able to adapt the workflow to our project and track necessary information for all hospitals in JIRA easily.

These programs serve different public health needs and our onboarding projects have different deliverables, but we learned from talking with other programs about pitfalls and successes in informatics. Most tools and lessons learned can be adapted to all public health electronic reporting projects. This is a lesson we can learn over and over again.