InfoAid: A Review of Who, What, When and Where?

Abstract: Informatics Aid (or InfoAid) is a mechanism that allows Fellows from the Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program (PHIFP) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to provide informatics assistance to CDC centers, US state and local health departments as well as international public health agencies. In this presentation, we plan to review the InfoAid experience of the Fellowship by presenting information about the requesting organizations, the types of projects, and when and where they were carried out, since the first reported InfoAid in 1999. We plan to summarize historical information and analyze the outcomes of the InfoAids. InfoAid projects are classified as: 1) project management, 2) database development and management, 3) systems analysis and 4) training. The systems analysis projects are the most common and consist of assessing existing information systems and generating recommendations for improvement. In the last few years, PHIFP has experienced a rapid increase in the total number of InfoAid requests. From 1999 to the present, the Fellowship Program has recorded 27 InfoAids, with more than 50% of them in 2007 and first quarter of 2008. This increase might be due to the growing need to integrate data and information from organizational and technical silos in the public health and health care arena. The scope of the InfoAids implemented over the past few years suggests the presence of a complex, multi-tier environment that public health informaticians need to be familiar with. These InfoAids also show that public health informaticians work at the interfaces between knowledge domains, as well as between information technology and public health.