Question

What opportunities does public health informatics provide to improving the health outcomes of communities? how the various levels of government are involved in public health informatics. please example a little in depth (200 words)

Answer 1

Solution -

Public health informatics is a domain within the broad umbrella of health informatics which is related to the collection and capture of information and application of that data through technology initiatives that can contribute to research and learning. Public health informatics is applied to various functions of health services such as nursing, in-house care system, clinical research, and physician practices.

Public health informatics assist in providing analysis and prediction on the overall population from the standpoint of the probability of diseases and different syndromes. This allows for the detection of the health issues and management of diseases by the government by introducing proactive and reactive measures to control such epidemics. It also helps the medical researchers in assessing the pain points of society and maneuvering and defining their research objectives accordingly.

The roles played at various levels by the government for assisting in public health informatics is through following -

• State Health Departments - Collection and storage of health data and statistics of the population. Such departments are the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System which ensures the collection of public health data
• Local Agencies - Collection and collation of data from the hospitals on aspects such as medical resource availability, trends on common diseases and infections detected. This data allows for proper assessment and prediction of the future state of health among the masses.
• Global Organizations - These associations also allow for conducting surveys and provide as a supplement for this data. Such organizations are the World Health Organization.

Public health informatics is a growing discipline and with technology supplementing this discipline there is a large scope for this domain to further grow globally.