Abstract
Public health surveillance of communicable diseases depends on timely, complete, accurate, and useful data that are collected across a number of healthcare and public health systems. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) which support electronic sharing of data and information between health care organizations are recognized as a source of ‘big data’ in healthcare and have the potential to provide public health with a single stream of data collated across disparate systems and sources. However, given these data are not collected specifically to meet public health objectives, it is unknown whether a public health agency’s (PHA’s) secondary use of the data is supportive of or presents additional barriers to meeting disease reporting and surveillance needs. To explore this issue, we conducted an assessment of big data that is available to a PHA—laboratory test results and clinician-generated notifiable condition report data—through its participation in a HIE.
Highlights
We evaluated two datasets—for sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and non-STIs—for the time period of 1 January 2012–15 September 2013 used by a public health agencies (PHAs) that is part of one of the largest and oldestHealth Information Exchanges (HIEs) infrastructures in the US
The two datasets were independently analyzed for their data quality, utility, and appropriateness for meeting public health surveillance objectives: (1) timeliness, defined as the difference between earliest date of a disease report and date the report is received at the PHA; (2) volume, defined as the number of disease report cases received by the PHA; and (3) completion, defined as the number of days to close a disease case report
While PHAs almost exclusively rely on secondary use data for surveillance, big data that has been collected for clinical purposes omits data fields of high value for public health
Summary
We evaluated two datasets—for sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and non-STIs—for the time period of 1 January 2012–15 September 2013 used by a PHA that is part of one of the largest and oldest. Given that these data are not collected to meet public health objectives, it is unknown whether a PHA’s secondary use of the data is supportive of or presents additional barriers to meeting disease reporting and surveillance needs To explore this issue, we conducted an assessment of big data that is available to a PHA—laboratory test results and clinician-generated notifiable condition report data—through its participation in a HIE and discuss the extent to which its value impacts the rationale for investing in the infrastructure, including workforce training, that is required to collect and interpret this data and inform measurable improvements in the health of public health community stakeholders
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