Biosurveillance, Case Reporting, and Decision Support: Public Health Interactions with a Health Information Exchange

This paper describes support for three public health practice domains in demonstrations of a model health information exchange (HIE): biosurveillance, case reporting, and communication from public health to providers through integrated decision support. The model HIE implements interoperability through the use of existing semantic and syntactic standards specified as part of Integration Profiles to support specific data transfer use cases. We implemented these profiles in several public health applications using a service-orientated architecture approach. Methods were validated for each public health domain in national showcase demonstrations. We believe that this work has implications for the integration of public health functions into any HIE, regardless of its architecture, because our informatics methods support a distributed environment. This approach may be extended to strengthen development of the Public Health Grid, a project currently being led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.