Table 2
Research Agenda Items in Public Health Informatics
| ▪ | Determine the current state of public health informatics (PHI) including infrastructure and workforce. |
| ▪ | Assess informatics tools for managing temporal, spatial, or multilevel data. |
| ▪ | Detail standard public health vocabulary used by staff in communities and specific program interventions. Can the vocabulary be standardized to allow for transferability? |
| ▪ | Study how public health staff uses data. What data are needed for decision making, and how best should that data be delivered? |
| ▪ | Develop methods of measuring the cost of informatics and the benefit that accrues from its use. |
| ▪ | Conduct case studies to identify real and perceived privacy issues that arise when public and private data are merged. |
| ▪ | Explore real time data acquisition and data mining for population data. |
| ▪ | Determine the health informatics aspects of a “preventive health record” for the community. |
| ▪ | Study the effect of programs on simulated communities and the utility of this tool for public health planners. |
| ▪ | Study the ethical issues needed to guide confidentiality policy. |
| ▪ | Explore the application of methods of statistical disclosure control to public health. |
| ▪ | Determine the workflow and data needs to inform policy. |
| ▪ | Determine the minimal level of identifiability needed for each public health task. |
| ▪ | Determine the security implications of architectures with respect to number of nodes and degree of centralization of data collection and storage. |
| ▪ | Determine the value and impact of the use of uniform coding and common clinical vocabulary on public health activities. |
