Health surveillance systems are essential tools for identifying the risk of pandemics and minimizing casualties of terrorism attacks. Locally and globally, a robust health informatics system would enable health professionals to detect, track and mitigate both natural and man-made emergencies.

Public health agencies can leverage electronic health records (EHRs) to support public health initiatives by:

• Using the EHR as a clinical workflow tool to provide a rich data set for public health planning and new initiatives and is a better source of aggregated data than voluntary reporting methods used for disease surveillance and for measuring the impact of public health programs
• Harnessing normal clinical workflow supports timelier, accurate and complete disease reporting and public health response

The Cadence Group Public Health Team is actively involved in planning and using EHRs of clinical data for disease surveillance, disease and program management, and other population health information needs.

Public health organizations gather, analyze and create copious amounts of unstructured information each day. The vast majority of this information is in electronic format and growing exponentially through informal practices of information storage and sharing. Without uniform electronic filing procedures or ease of access across organizational silos, agencies run the risk of having one document proliferate into multiple copies kept in unknown or inaccessible places. As government regulations concerning transparency and data privacy continue to increase, the ability to effectively secure, preserve and provide access to the authoritative version becomes vital. Procedures for publishing authoritative information through Internet and intranet sites are clear. However, significant quantities of valuable information exist in organizational silos that are housed in share drives obscured by duplicative and obsolete content, or possibly located in specialized repositories that lack enterprise-level governance and visibility, becoming lost with time.

Collaboration tools (e.g. MS SharePoint), can offer a more efficient way for these silos to share information. Unfortunately, we often see rollouts of these tools exacerbate the daunting issues caused by an exponentially growing quantity of duplicative and obsolete information.

To avoid these issues, Cadence Group works with clients to help define their information architecture, establish scope and governance, fully leverage the use of available tools, align with records management regulations, and communicate standard operating procedures before collaborative workspaces are propagated across the organization.

Performance Management (PM) and Quality Improvement (QI) are increasingly recognized as essential aspects of public health practice. To effectively respond to the need for more organization-wide PM, public health must adopt an approach to quality similar to that of other industries. Quality standards exist that are specific to public health and include Healthy People objectives and targets, disaster readiness and preparedness standards, National Public Health Performance Standards (NPHPS), public health agency accreditation standards, and individual public health program standards. However, proven techniques routinely employed to analyze, monitor and improve quality and performances are rarely used in public health.

Through extensive work in the public health sector, our team members have identified that few jurisdictions are taking steps to improve their public health system performance even after assessments point out weaknesses. We can provide assistance with models, tools, data translations and solutions tailored to public health practice. We have found that the results are excellent when private sector performance improvement models have been presented by credible public health leaders with clear applications to public health.