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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Rachel L. Richesson, PhD, MPH, College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Department of Pediatrics, 3650 Spectrum Blvd., Suite 100, Tampa, FL 33612, 813-396-9522, richesrl@epi.usf.edu

The lack of comparable data is a great obstacle for community health assessment activities. The need for health data standards remains a barrier to true interoperability across healthcare information systems, and limits opportunities to improve patient safety and public health. There are multiple layers of standards – including those that dictate the structure of databases and electronic messages (e.g., PHCDM, HL7), and terminologies or codesets (e.g., SNOMED CT, ICD-9) that are the “values” which are inserted. Public health researchers and decision-makers need to utilize and share health data from many knowledge domains, including vital signs, clinical findings, adverse events, mortality and morbidity data, medications, medical interventions and procedures, laboratory results, genetic data, and data from special procedures such as EKG and EEG. Consequently, there are many candidate standards and organizations involved in identifying health data standards. A generic overview (from the published literature) of methods for evaluating data standards will be presented. Knowledge domains that are important to public health, and the leading standards are in each of those domains will be discussed. Finally, public resources for accessing and understanding data standards relevant to public health will be shared.

Learning Objectives:

• Articulate why data standards are important for public health analysis and response.
• Discuss why uniform health data standards have not been achieved.
• List which knowledge domains are important to public health, and what the leading standards are in each of those knowledge domains.
• List methods for the evaluation and selection of data standards.
• Identify resources to access and understand various data standards.

Keywords: Data/Surveillance, Standards

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered

Handout (.pdf format, 6730.3 kb)