142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Home Events & Meetings Annual Meeting Schedule & Program

Online Program

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

300376
Environmental public health tracking: Overcoming the challenge of simultaneous disparate data in a health surveillance system

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 : 9:30 AM - 9:50 AM

Patrick Wall , Environmental Health Tracking Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, GA
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s National Center for Environmental Health is currently leading an initiative to build a National Tracking Network that integrates data into a network of standardized electronic data to provide valid scientific information on environmental exposures and adverse health conditions, as well as spatial and temporal relations between them.  In September 2002, the Tracking Program began to fund state and local partners to develop the National Tracking Network.  Since then, the Tracking Program expanded these partnerships, culminating in the official launching of the Tracking Network in 2009.

A web portal, hosted by the Environmental Public Health Tracking Program, is designed for different audiences including, government, the academic community, and the public. A primary goal of this portal is to allow the exploration of health effects, environmental, and demography data. The wide variety of data types along with stratifications across geography, time, race, age, and sex presents a complex problem when developing system functionality to query and display disparate data simultaneously in a comparable way using charts, tables, and maps.

While the ability to query and display data that span across geographies and multiple time periods for a single type of data has been the main feature set of the Tracking Portal, allowing the same for multiple data types is needed to enable users to explore trends and possible association among health and environmental data. The presentation will detail the need, methods, and results from integrating multiple data type selection into the components of the Tracking Portal. Additionally, the numerous challenges to design a generic and easily expandable interface, the need for proper messaging to accompany such an open query system, and options available for integrating multiple data type displays into a dynamic user-centric mapping display will be discussed.

Learning Areas:

Communication and informatics

Learning Objectives:
Discuss the vision and current capabilities of the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network. Identify challenges faced when trying to display multivariate data on a public health surveillance system. Compare different approaches to addressing the challenges of displaying multivariate data on a public health surveillance system.

Keyword(s): Environmental Health, Information Technology

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: Mr. Wall earned his BS in Computer Science from the University of Georgia and began his career in 1996 as the lead information technologist in CDC’s Radiation Studies Branch. In 2000, he joined the CDC’s Strategic National Stockpile Program where he led large and small information technology development projects. In 2002, he joined CDC’s Environmental Health Tracking Branch and currently works on informatics activities related to the development of the Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.

Back to: 4041.0: Health Informatics and Information Technology: Facilitating Data Sharing between Public Health and Clinical Care Systems