The Public Health Informatics Institute (PHII) recently published a blog entry written by Dr. Noam Arzt, president of HLN:
A public health perspective on interoperability
We have written previously about interoperability and its increasing important to public health. Yet public health has some specific challenges to making interoperability effective:
- There are more than 2,500 public health agencies in the U.S. at the federal, state, local, territorial and tribal levels. This not only leads to great diversity, but as a result public health cannot and does not speak with one voice about interoperability issues (or anything else for that matter). This makes it difficult for some stakeholders to engage public health consistently or to implement solutions that can be used more uniformly and therefore more effectively across public health.