EHR and Outbreak Management

Today, public health stands at the threshold of a new era that provides opportunities to integrate clinical data into public health practice in order to improve population health; to do so, relevant EHR data should be made available to the public health programs in a format they can use, in a language they comprehend, and at a suitable level of aggregate analysis suited to achieve public health functions such as surveillance. We will present an EHR-Public Health (PH) use case scenario that shall provide a representation of functional and technical mapping between clinical data- both structured and unstructured format- and public health functions during an outbreak such as swine flu. The use case scenario will incorporate orchestration of emerging technologies and standards such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Clinical Document Architecture (CDA), AHIC use case and T81 HITSP standards to achieve the stated objectives. We will also review the current state of information science/technology and then discuss opportunities and challenges related to the use of electronic laboratory reporting (ELR), automated case reporting, and outbreak investigation. We will also provide a brief example of bidirectional communication between public health community and clinical practice that can be then leveraged for management of an outbreak.