Get Your Dose of Data! An Introduction to Public Health Informatics

Welcome, everyone, to your introductory course in public health informatics! On today's episode, we discuss all things public health, including what it is, how it varies on a state and national level, and how health departments respond to public health crises. We demystify some of our misconceptions about how the public health system works, like how state departments are separate from the CDC, how we share disease statistics such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how our medical history may or may not travel with us from state to state. Of course, our question always is, why does informatics matter in this conversation? Our guests have many ideas about how we can utilize informatics to create more efficient means of sharing data and, by extension, improving our overall public health.

Dr. Bryant Thomas Karras is the Chief Medical Informatics Officer at the State of Washington Department of Health and a faculty member at the University of Washington's School of Public Health. He is a physician, biomedical engineer, and informatician who uses his multifaceted experience to promote interoperability and help various agencies utilize new technologies in their public health efforts. He's advised health departments on a local, state, and national level, including the Center of Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Jessie Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor at Duke University School of Medicine, and she recently concluded a five-year tenure as the Chief Data Officer for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Her work focuses on enhancing data-driven decision-making to improve public health outcomes and finding AI methods to improve whole person health. She's served on the editorial board for the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, on AMIA's Board of Directors, and on the Board of Scientific Counselors for the National Library of Medicine, all while advocating for women in STEM and precision medicine efforts. We were so thankful to have both of these experts on this episode!

Last but not least, we were joined by a new guest—Lauren Malloy joined us as a co-host for this episode. Lauren is the administrative coordinator for the Artificial Intelligence for Ambulatory Care Innovation Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, which investigates how technology can address healthcare challenges. Her insights into how public health issues manifest in our daily lives were invaluable, and we were honored to have her as a guest star!

We hope you enjoy this episode as much as we did filming it!

"Cheat Sheet" to the acronyms discussed in this episode:

-AMIA: American Medical Informatics Association

-APHL: Association for Public Health Laboratories

-CDC: Center for Disease Control and Prevention

-CDO/CIO/CMIO: Chief Data Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Medical Informatics Officer

-ECR: electronic case reporting

-EHR: electronic health record

-EIS: Epidemic Intelligence Service

-IIS: Immunization Information System

-IPS: International Patient Summary (Canada)

-HHS: Department of Health and Human Services

-NPI: National Patient Identifier, also National Provider Identifier

-PPRL: Privacy Protecting Record Linkage

-VCI: verifiable clinical information

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