Call for Public Review
<November 19, 2007> The Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC) and the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise initiative (IHE) invite public health, clinical and information technology experts to review the White Paper, Building a Roadmap for Health Information Systems Interoperability for Public Health.
The White Paper has been developed by the PHDSC-IHE Task Force participants to facilitate standardization of health information exchanges between clinical care and public health. The objective of the White Paper is to engage the public health community in a dialogue with health information technology (HIT) vendors to assure that the work processes and data needs of public health stakeholders in health information exchanges are 1) well understood and agreed upon by the stakeholders and then (2) communicated clearly to the developers of the interoperable clinical Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and Public Health information systems (EHR-PH Systems).
The White Paper consists of three sections. The first section describes public health and population health practices of public health agencies that require health information exchanges with clinical care. The second and third sections describe Immunization and Cancer Surveillance domains as examples of public health programs in the IHE Technical Tasks for Information Exchanges outline. The Appendix section contains the description of examples of other public health domains (research, chronic care, personal health record, surveys, obesity, cancer, etc.).
The public review period will be open from November 19, 2007 – January 19, 2008.
Please go to Technical Frameworks (PCC) to download the White Paper and submit your comments.
During the review period, we would like to invite representatives of public health domains/programs to submit a description of their domains/programs using the IHE Technical Tasks for Information Exchange outline, so the final White Paper can include other examples of public health domains in addition to the Immunization and Cancer Surveillance domains.
We also would like to invite the reviewers to join our Task Force to participate in the formation of a Public Health Domain at IHE to begin collaboration between public health and HIT vendor communities to guide the development of the IHE Integration Profiles for the Electronic Health Record Systems, to enable electronic information exchange between clinical and public health settings. We believe that this White Paper may serve as a framing document for the creation of the Public Health Domain at IHE.
For more information about the PHDSC-IHE Public Health Task Force, please contact Dr. Anna Orlova, PHDSC Executive Director at <aorlova@jhsph.edu>.