Building a Healthier Minnesota, One Data Point at a Time
What started as a COVID-19 project has grown into something bigger than anyone imagined. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, healthcare systems were operating with limited data to understand how Minnesotans were being impacted and make informed decisions about where to deploy resources. Enter the Minnesota Electronic Health Records Consortium (MN EHRC).
The MN EHRC is a collaboration across Minnesota healthcare systems and statewide healthcare organizations, including the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), Minnesota Community Measurement, the University of Minnesota, and Mayo Clinic, to name a few. It provides in-depth, de-identified information on health disparity metrics in relation to social determinants of health (SDOH) such as race, gender, rurality, ethnicity, language, and age with regard to COVID-19, substance use disorders, and other chronic conditions (hypertension, cardiovascular disease).
By aggregating electronic health records data from the major health systems in the state, the MN EHRC provided near real-time data during the COVID-19 pandemic to policymakers, public health professionals, and researchers. Fast forward to 2026, and the data is now being used for critical data points around substance use disorders and chronic conditions.
According to their About Us webpage, “The mission of the MN EHR Consortium is to improve health by informing policy and practice through data-driven collaboration among members of Minnesota’s health care community.”
Turning Numbers Into Neighborhood Impact
Nestled within the MN EHRC are several statewide and community projects, including Health Trends Across Communities (HTAC). According to HTAC co-founder Tyler Winkelman, MD, MSc, this robust resource has been available for about two years and is funded by the MDH and local public health agencies.
Prior to HTAC, local data at the census-tract level was either not available or it was too outdated to be useful for fast-moving situations.
Many states, including Minnesota, don’t have a single repository to pull real-time, region-specific health data from.
“The problem that we were trying to solve is that local public health agencies spend a lot of both personnel and financial resources on putting together data for their mandated community health assessments. These are assessments that are required periodically by local public health agencies to report on the health of the population that they serve and to inform their programs and policies to improve the health of the population,” said Dr. Winkelman.
By partnering with local public health agencies to bring together the electronic health records across several Minnesota healthcare systems, HTAC was able to bridge this much-needed gap in community healthcare. While much of the data for public health agencies is derived from survey data, it’s not as granular at the community level, and the data can often be outdated.
Source: Minnesota Electronic Health Record Consortium, Health Trends Across Communities (HTAC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAFkS30hvWs
Keeping Data Local, Delivering Statewide Impact
Something unique about HTAC? The EHR data is not all located in a centralized repository. Big data warehouses or “data lakes” are rife with security concerns, but HTAC found a way to address data needs while prioritizing privacy.
Dr. Winkelman explained, “We developed a system where the healthcare systems could keep their data at their sites. They didn’t need to send all of their health data to one location. Then we were able to send them the analysis to run, and they could generate the information. Later, we aggregate the results from each of the systems.”
Using HTAC analytics, each regional jurisdiction can drill down into its population’s healthcare needs, which in turn informs local policies and practices. HTAC allows counties that have high rates of treatable conditions to be better examined and compared to surrounding counties. One real-life example includes Goodhue County in Southeastern Minnesota.
In Goodhue County (its county seat is Red Wing, Minn.), prior to using HTAC, they typically conducted a 50-question community health assessment every three years with a less than 18 percent response rate. After implementing HTAC data, they were able to streamline their annual questionnaire to reduce duplicative data collection and focus on community-specific questions that allow for a greater understanding of local health conditions and possible interventions. This combination of health assessment methods recently led to their local police department applying for a grant that embeds a social worker into the community. That social worker focuses on prevention and early intervention in mental health crises, which could lead to fewer suicide attempts.
Using Data to Drive Change
While HTAC is still in its infancy as a resource, it’s slowly enhancing its available data around vulnerable populations and better filtering options for users to more easily switch between various healthcare conditions and city versus county data, which in turn improves community health assessments.
Dr. Winkelman elaborated, “[Vulnerable populations] include people who are experiencing homelessness or have recently experienced incarceration. Those are types of data that are increasingly rare that we’ve doubled down on and are continuing to highlight as an important source of information and policy for public health. The dashboard now has new health conditions, which include race and ethnicity reporting, as well as expanded mapping features.”
As HTAC unfolds over time, Dr. Winkelman hopes that HTAC is a conversation starter to highlight healthcare disparities and create opportunities for enhanced access to care.
“I hope that in the coming years, as different public health agencies create policies or programs to reduce disparities and improve access for certain conditions, that we’ll be able to both see that in our data and potentially also structure some evaluations around the changes that local public health agencies have made to really quantify the impact of providing community-level data to our public health partners.”