New Means of Data Collection and Accessibility

Abstract

Public health is a data-driven and data-intensive enterprise. Current and emerging public health threats require timely collection of high-quality health data for designing appropriate public health interventions to improve population health. Changes in the health care landscape over the years have created new data pipelines for public health agencies and have emphasized the need for social determinants of health data. On the other hand, advances in consumer, social, and enterprise technologies have enabled creation of new data sources and novel methods of accessing and analyzing data. This presents key challenges for public health agencies to leverage the available data for public health action. This chapter introduces an informatics management framework for planning and implementing data collection and access systems in a public health agency. The chapter also discusses some of the traditional and novel data sources for health data, technologies to collect and access health data, and the future of data collection and access.