CDC Funding for Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics

The University of Washington has been awarded one of the first CDC grants to establish a Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics to improve the public’s health through discovery, innovation, and research related to health information and information technology.

My PublicHealth

The goal of the myPublicHealth project is the design, development and evaluation of an interactive digital knowledge management system.

Decision Support for Disease Surveillance

Studies the value of regional health information organization data and data management practices and novel algorithmic approaches to enhance disease surveillance and reporting.

EpiVue

EpiVue is an epidemiologic visualization and mapping tool under development that is integrating open source technologies to build a cost effective information system for better utilization of public health data.

A collaboration of public health professionals and faculty are working to develop a set of specific public health informatics competencies that will set a standard for graduate education and fellowship training in public health informatics.

Kitsap County Health District: Our Business is Your Business

Biomedical and Health Informatics faculty members, Anne Turner, MD, MPH, MLIS and Janet Baseman, PhD, MPH, in collaboration with the Kitsap County Health District, were awarded a grant to define and evaluate the current business processes in the area of chronic disease prevention and control. 

Local Health Department Information Workflow

A detailed qualitative investigation of the information workflow of communicable disease activities of a Washington State local health department. A framework based on contextual inquiry and participatory design is being used to evaluate the adoption of electronic disease reporting systems.

Improving practitioners’ access to public health interventions in the gray literature utilizing advanced natural language processing.

Investigations into the online searching behavior of public health professionals to determine the criteria public health professionals use to find quality public health information on the internet. These findings will be incorporated into the development of a ”smart” web-based crawler to identify and summarize relevant quality public health gray literature documents.  The project is being done in collaboration with Syracuse University’s Center for Natural Language Processing (Elizabeth Liddy, PI)

Community Health Assessment Key Indicators

In the absence of a standard method for data collection, local public health departments must devise their own strategies for data collection and analysis. This study will investigate the community assessment strategies of local public health organizations in Washington State to establish key data integration needs.