What is Public Health Informatics?
Public Health Informatics may be defined as the systematic application of information technologies and systems to public health practice.
Information technology is playing an increasingly important role in helping public health both manage client information for the delivery of direct services and assist in the efficient evaluation of health outcomes and program effectiveness. Public Health Informatics is closely related to Medical Informatics, which began as a discipline in the 1980's to address the "disconnect" between health professionals who are focused on patient care and information technology professionals who were often unfamiliar with the intricacies of medical practice. Health care administrators and managers wanted to achieve the same efficiencies that other industries had gained through the use of information systems and new technologies, but front-line practitioners were often "left out" of the process, which was an element of many costly failures in the deployment of information systems in the private sector.
Public Health Informatics at DPHHS
Public Health Informatics was formed as a work unit within the Public Health System Improvement & Preparedness Bureau during the Department's 2004 reorganization of State-level public health. The change was necessary due to the increasing number of systems Montana's public health community was being required to support at both the State and local levels. The need for these changes became apparent during the public health visioning process where it was concluded that Montana's public health programs had no unifying strategy for the creation of systems to support the public health "enterprise." The current path, which has State and local agencies implementing a large number of reporting, client tracking, and case management systems to support each new public health program implemented cannot be sustained indefinitely. In other words, putting a new data system or data collection process in place to implement each new public health activity is not a viable strategy for the long term. The Public Health Informatics Section was created to support a different vision, where public health programs at the State and local levels would support a common set of applications running over an Internet-based architecture.
