Public Health Informatics (PHI)

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This track will focus on opportunities to advance the public health informatics agenda through collaborative action between AMIA and public health practice. Attendees will engage in direct discussions with public health leaders about the informatics needs facing public health agencies. Panelists will present approaches for transforming informatics competency for practitioners into public health organizational capacity. The track will provide a forum for examining collaborative requirements efforts to modernize public health information systems. Sessions will highlight collaborative actions by ASTHO, NACCHO, CSTE, APHL and other professional organizations to incorporate population health as an integral element of the national health information syst

Learning Objectives:

• Discuss informatics needs facing local, state, and federal public health agencies and identify opportunities for collaborative
  
• Explain why a collaborative approach to requirement specifi cation is essential to the public health enterprise and discuss informatics methods for modernizing state and local public health systems
  
• Describe how to improve informatics competency and capacity in public health practice.
  

(S05) Panel: Electronic Health Records and Public Health–Making Connections
Thursday, May 29, 2008, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Panel to include:
William A. Yasnoff
NHII Advisors, Arlington, VA
Theresa Ann Cullen
Indian Health Service, Rockville, MD
Noam H. Arzt
HLN Consulting, LLC, San Diego, CA
Bill Brand
Minnesota Department of Health, St. Paul, MN

The opening panel of the public health informatics track will look at the intersection of electronic health records and public health. Panelists will discuss historical perspectives on public health informatics, using clinical data for improving population health, early adopter experiences with an immunization information system, and describe specifi c examples of how public health interoperability has been fostered at the state level.


(S09) Panel: Public Health Associations–Question and Answer Session
Thursday, May 29, 2008, 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Panel to include:
Poki Namkung
Co-chair, Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force, National Association of County and City Health Offi cials (NACCHO), Washington, DC
Bill Hacker
Co-chair, Joint Public Health Informatics Task Force, Association of State and Territorial Health Offi cials (ASTHO), Arlington, VA
Jim Pearsol
Association of State and Territorial Health Offi cials (ASTHO), Arlington, VA
Perry Smith
Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), Atlanta, GA
Art Davidson
National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), Washington, DC

Representatives from the Association of Public Health Laboratories to be determined.

This session will feature representatives from organizations focused on public and population health examining how the country can move toward modernization of public health information technology practice. These organizations have partnered with AMIA on the 2008 Spring Congress to raise awareness of the many common interests and to explore potential collaborations. Panelists will respond to a series of questions surrounding informatics needs facing local, state, and federal public health agencies and identify opportunities for collaborative action.


(S13) Panel: Collaborative Requirements and the Public Health Informatics Agenda
Friday, May 30, 2008, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Panel to include:
John Lumpkin
National Opinion Research Center, Bethesda, MD
Daniel Chaput
PatientsLifeMe, Cambridge, MA
Prashila Dullabh
Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA
Jennifer Fritz
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL
Representatives from the Association of Public Health Laboratories to be determined.

Presentations on this panel will present an overview of the collaborative requirements to further enable the public health informatics agenda. Speakers will look at the requirements needed on the ground in the public health community, how to build a stronger and common public health informatics infrastructure, experiences of the public health laboratories, surveillance of chronic diseases, and emergency response resources.


(S17) Panel: Improving Public Health Reporting–Use Cases, Knowledge-base Development, and a Federated Model
Friday, May 30, 2008, 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Panel to include:
Catherine Staes
University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
Wu Xu
Utah Department of Health, Salt Lake City, UT
Arthur J. Davidson
Oracle Corporation, Redwood Shores, CA
Cecil Lynch
OntoReason, LLC, Midvale, UT
Leslie Lenert
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA

The emerging community health information exchanges and grid technologies create opportunities for the electronic exchange of information between clinical settings and public health. Public health authorities can be both an information receiver and sender in information exchange. A knowledge-base incorporating standards-based public health ontologies will be valuable for various public health reporting processes, particularly for the use case of reporting notifi able conditions. A knowledge-base for managing notifi able condition reporting can be used to create logic constraints to automatically detect and extract reportable information and transmit information to appropriate public health authorities. The panelists will explore this use case from differing perspectives by describing 1) the current problem with specifi c examples from Utah, 2) discuss considerations for implementation of a knowledge-base in a federated environment for the Colorado RHIO, and 3) the development of an ontology for the fi rst knowledge-base application for nationally notifi able condition reporting. Finally, the Director of the National Center for Public Health Informatics at the CDC will share his vision for strategies to coordinate the development of an open-source, nationallystandardized, locally-amendable public health reporting system.


(S21) Panel: Competency to Curriculum—Public Health Informatics Workforce Development
Saturday, May 31, 2008, 8:30 am - 10:00 am

The panel will focus on the need of a public health workforce trained in the fundamentals of public health informatics. Speakers will discuss critical training and education needs of the public health workforce, how to enhance curricular content for public health informatics, how to stimulate innovations in public health informatics, and how a competent public health workforce can advance the Nation’s public health informatics agenda.

Panel to include
William Hersh (Moderator)
Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR
Denise Koo
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Don E. Detmer
American Medical Informatics Association, Bethesda, MD
Martin LaVenture
Minnesota Department of Health, St. Paul, MN
Kathleen Miner
Emory University, Atlanta, GA


Posters
A complete list of posters by track is available here.
2008 AMIA Spring Congress posters will provide an ideal opportunity for conference attendees to learn about preliminary research results or results of small scale studies, illustrating and discussing innovative systems and services, describing experimental and in-practice projects and programs, reporting experiences with educational programs, and other dimensions of medical informatics.