ePublic Health Campaign
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ePublic Health is defined as the management and use of information through policy, standards, practice, governance, and technology that advance the United States’ ability to protect and improve public health. Featuring the use of decision-support tools such as syndromic surveillance, electronic health records, documentation systems, mobile devices, websites, and social media, ePublic Health improves access to and distribution of health information. These tools can improve the health and well-being of populations by enhancing preventative measures, informing policy and personal health behavior decisions, and clarifying issues such as access, quality, continuity, cost of care, and the social determinants of health. Now it is your turn. Can you help build this vision of the future? Create your own headlines and add them to the list. We’ll use this crowdsourcing to create an image for the future of ePublic Health at LHDs. A few examples:
2013 NACCHO Exchange (winter): Executive Director’s Column By Robert M. Pestronk, MPH, Executive Director, NACCHO
In a world gone digital and mobile, ePublic health is changing local health department (LHD) practice just as “e” has changed and will continue to change how other businesses do business and how people do business with business. ePublic health must be foundational to LHD infrastructure and practice. ePublic health includes electronic health records, telemedicine, consumer health informatics, health knowledge management, virtual healthcare teams, mHealth, using grid computing for medical and population health, and healthcare and health information systems. Such emerging technologies will blur boundaries among credentialed and non-credentialed public health workers and the public as technology places capacities and content from ePublic health within reach of nearly anyone. Widespread acceptance of ePublic health will depend in part on continued sensitivity to and laws protecting privacy and confidentiality. Blithe “checks” in app acknowledgment boxes and a new generation of people whose life stories are offered freely on digital sites may herald a revised sensibility to these issues. Will users become inured to the regular reports of unauthorized data breaches and releases of personal information? Will they simply become accepted as a cost of doing business as the world goes increasingly digital? Despite the importance of ePublic health to the ongoing practice of LHDs, and the excellent examples of LHD practice offered in this issue of NACCHO Exchange, hurdles block wider adoption of electronic technologies and practices nationwide. Among these are inconsistent and poorly documented business processes and standards; paltry funding appropriated specifically for LHDs to influence, upgrade, and link their electronic systems with those being designed for and adopted by, for example, clinical and social service organizations; lack of funding for LHDs to scale up successful pilot projects to nationwide implementation; low priority given to LHD “e” within larger governmental “e” re-enterprising; inadequate workforce capacity and capability to monitor, use, and link to emerging “e”nvironmental changes; and leadership from cross-sector partnerships that recognize the importance of governmental presence locally, statewide, and nationally to ensure that communities, regardless of location, are protected, healthy, and secure. For many reasons, the advancement and pace of adoption of ePublic health will vary by location. Time magazine (2) characterizes the “new” America as “not so much the old e pluribus unum—out of many, one—but as [Ralph Ellison] says, one and yet many.” This aptly describes the public health enterprise with its complicated responsibility framework across domains of federal, state, and local governmental and non-governmental organizations and practice.(3) Can LHDs envision a more complete picture of the future to help construct a bridge to that future, to be insightful enough to pass the present “puck” to where future colleagues will need to be? (4) I invite you to add your “e” public health headlines of the future below. Let’s “crowdsource” a practical vision from those most knowledgeable…you and those you know! Notes
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In the winter 2013 NACCHO Exchange, Robert Pestronk, NACCHO Executive Director, challenges local health officials to envision the future of local health departments and their use of ePublic Health.