Public health surveillance is the cornerstone of all public health activities, and essential public healthservices include monitoring health status to identify and solve community health problems, and diagnosingand investigating health problems in the community. Progress towards interoperable electronic healthrecords and regional health information exchange initiatives offers the promise of much higher quality clinicaldata for surveillance purposes.Our overall goal is to develop and demonstrate electronic health information exchange from clinicalinformation systems that improves public health surveillance of emerging health issues.We plan to test the following hypotheses:(1) Routine reporting of antibiotic resistance data through the Electronic Clinical Laboratory Reportinginfrastructure is feasible, acceptable, and useful for public health surveillance. To test this hypothesis, weplan to initiate secure, standards-based electronic reporting of antibiotic resistance testing data from multipleclinical laboratories within NYC and to create community-wide outpatient antibiograms.(2) Electronic health records contain structured and unstructured data that can provide specific, actionableinformation for real-time public health surveillance purposes. To test this hypotheses, we plan to examine theperformance characteristics of ambulatory electronic health record (EHR) data elements for syndromic caseand outbreak detection, employing natural language processing for the unstructured elements.
| Diamond, Carol C; Mostashari, Farzad; Shirky, Clay (2009) Collecting and sharing data for population health: a new paradigm. Health Aff (Millwood) 28:454-66 |
| Mostashari, Farzad; Tripathi, Micky; Kendall, Mat (2009) A tale of two large community electronic health record extension projects. Health Aff (Millwood) 28:345-56 |
