Electronic health records are expected to bring a number of benefits to individual practices, including lower costs and improved quality. However, members of the public health community also believe that these technologies will create a wealth of data that could vastly improve population-based medicine.
Seth Fodly, director of public health informatics and technology at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told InformationWeek that interconnected information networks could allow public health works to analyze epidemiology trends and understand and predict future outbreaks.
"Public health agencies, from local to state to federal, have been building information technology for years, but because we don't have a lot of connections to y'all, we don't have a lot of information to share," he told the news source. "In the future, we assume that most of our public health allies will be perched in front of their EHRs."
He pointed out that electronic health records systems already played a role in helping public health workers control the 2009 H1N1 outbreak by giving them access to immunization reports.
Currently, several states across the country are working to create regional health information exchanges, which could serve as the main points for collecting data for public health agencies.