Emerging role of health information technology in public health

The author discusses a starting-point premise of Health Information Technology infrastructure which is expanding rapidly in public health practices in the United States and potentially in other developed nations. For example, we find continuous expansion of Electronic Health Record applications with strong push from the government sector for Physicians, Hospitals and other providers to convert paper based practices to digital and an interoperable framework. Using Health Exchanges, soon EHRs are expected to directly transmit patient and disease based data to public health registries which currently is a rather manual process. We also find expanding role of telemedicine technology for patient outreach as well as in Disaster Medicine. Last but not least, while the basic premises of public health is expanding, in this age of digital “big data” analytics, the role of Information Technology is undergoing new applications, technology and strategies to improve population health, health outcomes and health registries.