Introduction to Health Cyberinfrastructure: Applications and Technologies for Population Health and Health Services Minitrack

Realizing the full potential of health information technology (Health IT) to impact and transform public health requires breaking down the often vertical structures within which vital scientific and medical information currently reside, allowing for widespread sharing, analysis, and application within and across disciplines. Obtaining this goal entails establishing interfaces that link the existing islands of surveillance, community and population data, scientific research, clinical and even personal health data maintained by consumers themselves. Such collaborative access, analysis, and communication requires that future technology deployments be designed and implemented in a manner that ensures the highest level of interoperability, such as the use of open source technologies and the Internet. Furthermore, it requires innovation in the way data is collected, shared, accessed, communicated, analyzed, and ultimately, used by seemingly disparate factions of the public health and health services domain. Such innovation would serve to improve anticipation of and response times to developing health issues with the goal of averting health crises and benefiting the population as a whole. A cyberinfrastructure is comprised of complementary components including high performance computing infrastructure, data, analysis and visualization, virtual organizations for distributed communities, and learning and workforce development, all connected by an interoperable suite of software services and tools. Relevant to the notion of data use, cyberinfrastructure also pertains to the burgeoning growth of applications that use both established data sources, such as surveillance, research, administrative, biological, and genomic/proteomic data, and emerging data sources, such as, EHRs/PHRs, mobile devices, web 2.0, and data.gov, for public health impact. This mini-track highlights some of the health cyberinfrastructure applications and technologies for population health and health services. It will feature the following papers: