Memphis Database Delivers Major Public Health Benefits

“That's worth a lot of effort and a lot of expenditure right there, to avoid that one incident of exposure,” he said. “How do you put a value on that?”

Other benefits are more mundane but just as potentially valuable, Dr. Shenep added.

For example, children with brain cancer often receive their surgery at one hospital center and their chemotherapy at another hospital center. Historically, there have been delays in having critical lab data faxed back and forth between the two hospitals, he said. Now, those culture results and the latest radiology reports are available in the database. “This has been a great benefit for those patients who get treated at both centers,” he explained.

If one of those pediatric oncology patients is in an accident, ED staff could access those records as well, Dr. Shenep said. “They might see low hemoglobin and think the patient must be having a major bleed—but the hemoglobin may be low because of chemo,” he added.

The Memphis database project has managed to combine data from hospitals that normally compete with one another, even though the data are in different formats and different standards. In addition, leaders of the project went into the community to describe what the project hoped to achieve and how privacy would be protected, Dr. Frisse explained.

To replicate Memphis' progress, a city would need “sustained leadership” that continued to press for change even through opposition, he said. “The real challenge here is culture.”