Question

1. Much of public health informatics involves the application of disease surveillance and monitoring systems. These systems collect and provide data for epidemiologists, biostatisticians and other public health professionals to analyze to get a better picture of public health status. Partners in Information Access for the Public Health Workforce http://phpartners.org/health_stats.html is a collaborative of local, state, territorial, national and private partners that provides up-to-date resources and information for public health professionals. There is a list of many of the widely used surveillance systems, databases, reports and tools in the field compiled by the collaborative. Browse several of the links in each subheading (Tools for Data Collection and Planning, GIS, etc.).

a. Choose one of the resources and summarize the data tool/resource and explain why it is significant in a short paragraph.

b. How do these tools and data help health professionals and the public?

c. What do we gain from analyzing this data?

Answer 1

a. One of the main data tool /resource is CDC - Centres for disease control and prevention .This is the CDC surveillance resource centre .It is developed to provide guidance to the health care providers and its partners for surveillance of public health .The data that are collected by CDC are easily or organised systematically and it provides as access as guidance to public health surveillance .Usually Surveillance of public health includes the collection of data , analysis of data and its interpretation .The data collected are analysed ,interpreted and used for target population .It also helps in standardisation of data and surveillance systems thereby enabling the regulation of policies and restriction in sharing the data .The interactive database systems provides an up-to-date data about the public health ..The tools also contains templates ,surveys ,questionnaires and slide sets which are required for data collection

b.

• It provides guidance to public health surveillance .
• It helps in easy collection of data and interpretation  of it .
• It helps to identify the indicators of health such as Infant mortality rate ,Morbidity rate ,death rate ,birth rate etc.
• It helps in identification of the health parameters such as demographic data ,population of the area ,and surveys of the health .
• It also gives about the reproductive health indicators which are more essential to predict health quality.
• it is also a tool to highlight the essential strength and weakness of the health .

C. If the data are analysed it helps to identify the problems that are being faced by the public Heath thereby taking necessary steps to prevent further issues .

• It may provide the government to provide adequate precautionary steps to prevent the issues in health
• Improving the health literacy among the public
• In providing better care to the patients thereby ensuring the safety of the patient .
• It helps to develop the academic needs of the health care system .
• It helps to increase the awareness in the community thereby providing the data
• It helps in engaging the people with disabilities and also provide the baseline data for the research purposes .
• It helps in receiving the funds for the further developments in the field of medicine and public health .
• It helps in studying the preventive medicine and further increases the necessity of the preventive medicine .

These are the ways that it is useful in collecting the data .