Editorial: OJPHI Vol 3, No 2 (2011)

The current issue of OJPHI contains eight refereed articles and a working paper. While these articles came from independent sources, they represent a common theme—the use of information science and communication technologies to advance the fields of public health practice and healthcare in general. They cover articles that use XForms standards to demonstrate bi-directional communication between provider and public health systems, explore the migration of hand-held health records from paper-based systems to electronic formats to track health risks in developing countries, utilize agent based models to study the spread of infectious diseases within communities, explore crowdinforming as a process control strategy to balance patient loads among emergency departments, analyze the use of food safety informatics as a technological tool to protect consumers in real time against foodborne illnesses, demonstrate the efficacy of the use of telemedicine to remotely supervise newly graduated general dentists in rural India, identify the factors that facilitate the adoption web-based health portals for health statistics dissemination in Indonesia, and explore patient-centric modifications to the electronic medical records architecture. Early detection of risks to the community such as outbreaks of infectious or foodborne diseases depend on the timely reporting of notifiable conditions to public health agencies by health care providers, laboratories, and others mandated to carry our such notifications. Notifiable condition reporting and alerting are two important public health functions. The recent HITECH Act of 2009 emphasizes interoperability between provider systems and public health systems. In a paper entitled " Applying the XForms Standard to Public Health Case Reporting and Alerting, " Rebecca A Hills et al. used XForms standards and nationally recognized technical profiles to demonstrate bi-directional communication in a health information exchange environment. The authors suggest that health departments explore the use of XForms or similar technologies to use XML documents for notifiable condition reporting and patient-specific public health alerting. Patient-held health records have been used over the years to track health risks, vaccinations and other preventative health measures performed. There is evidence that mothers who have timely access to their health records and the records of their children have greater ability to track their own health and engage in prevention activities. Their families tend to have better healthcare outcomes. In many developing countries, patient-held maternal and/or child health records are mostly paper-based. There is the urge in most countries to transfer these paper-based records into electronic formats. However, not enough is known about the …