Description
The US health informatics landscape has seen an increased emphasis on data integration across the previously separate clinical, management, insurance, and public health data silos 1, 2. The sharing of social determinants of health (SDH) data across public health, population health, and social services is the prime example of how the landscape of public and population health informatics practice is evolving and converging 3. Data collected by public health departments are key sources of data required to calculate population-level health measures that will eventually be used to determine global budgets for medical care delivery systems and to assess whether they reach their community health targets to achieve substantial financial incentives. With this shift in thinking, there is also an increased acknowledgment of the importance of considering a broad array of “non-medical” factors generally termed as SDH 4, 5.
Many informatics professionals’ top priority is the advancement of public, population, and community health outcomes. Concurrently, the need for SDH data and the growing opioid abuse crisis require new ways of thinking about public health data and related issues. These factors and others are driving fundamental and impactful advances as well as exposing informatics gaps in many facets of healthcare, public, and population health domains.
In this pre-symposium workshop, we propose to lead and facilitate dynamic sharing of ideas and understanding of the evolving health care ecosystem encompassing community, public, population and patient-centric health care. We anticipate faculty, presenters, and participants alike will experience engaging and insightful discussion of current challenges and innovative solutions as well as new perspectives for advancing future public and population health informatics. Further development of consensus statements to advance progress in areas of informatics, SDH, and bridging the gap between clinical and public health will be developed and communicated broadly 6.
Learning Objective: 1. Bring public health, healthcare, and AMIA informatics professionals together to critically examine SDH data flow issues and explore effective collaboration efforts with clinical and public health partners.
2. Increase the understanding and engagement of AMIA participants in broader public and population health practice including both SDH and clinical metrics that better describes the health status of the community.
3. Expose more public health professionals to current efforts that are developing leadership and bridges among providers, laboratories, vendors, and public health to improve the population health outcomes.
4. Appraise the status of health information technology in public and population health practice and propose solutions to advance the benefits of health information technology, and the community partnerships from the use of this technology, for fundamental and pressing population and public health issues.
5. Demonstrate hands on population and public health informatics applications which illustrate major progress, innovation and, or barriers (e.g., case studies, and/or demonstrations).
6. Outline the gaps and challenges of the existing population and public health informatics research and propose and explore innovative solutions to bridge these gaps using SDH data.
7. Formulate collaborative objectives by expanding the bounds of community health status measures that integrate mental, social, and physical health.
Authors:
Roland Gamache (Presenter)
Johns Hopkins
Hadi Kharrazi (Presenter)
Johns Hopkins
Presentation Materials: