Establishing a health information exchange research network (HIERN) to support population health studies

We propose the Health Information Exchange Research Network (HIERN) to advance population health research by leveraging state and regional HIEs and their representative real-world data. HIERN builds on existing governance and infrastructure to create centralized or distributed data repositories for longitudinal, multisource data integration. It helps study important clinical and epidemiological topics, such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias, one of the fastest-growing chronic conditions in the United States.