Charting the Way with TRAX for Chronic Disease Surveillance

In December 2022, the Washington Healthcare Forum Board and Washington Department of Health (DOH) senior leadership agreed to develop a plan for improving public health chronic disease surveillance in Washington state. Through a joint planning committee process, we created a plan for a cooperatively governed, technologically flexible, secure platform for sharing data. The approach, known as TRAX (Transformational Repository & Analytics eXchange), recognizes the importance of effective governance alongside health information exchange (HIE). TRAX governance partners identified priority conditions, diabetes and hypertension, to scope early projects (using anonymous patient-level longitudinal data). Leveraging public health HIE advances, like the eCR Now FHIR App, and the national Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) infrastructure, is reducing development time and administrative burden¹. Using nationally available standards and infrastructure, TRAX is an adaptable approach; a reproducible data sharing solution for cross-jurisdictional healthcare systems; and a potential national model for chronic disease surveillance.