Methods for Information Sharing to Support Health Monitoring

Yhe practice of real-time surveillance of disease categories, sometimes called syndromic surveillance, is widespread at local, state, and national levels. The diseases identified by these systems, however, ignore health department jurisdictional boundaries. This creates situations where it is important for public health officials to be aware of conditions in other jurisdictions. There are currently two fundamental ways for systems to accomplish this: (i) share the underlying data or (ii) share information produced by the systems or their users. While many other efforts have concentrated on sharing data, the JHU/APL Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics has been working on technology that allows information (rather than data) to be shared between multiple public health jurisdictions.