What’s The Role of Digital Health in Public Health?

What digital health technology solutions would empower public health agencies and professionals to do an effective job?

Not just any technology, however, as the digital health tools available to large medical centers are prohibitively expensive for public health and not necessarily what public health needs to do an effective job. The Basics of Public Health At its most foundational, public health is about preventing the rapid spread of highly communicable diseases, and a primary tool in that prevention effort is vaccines. That latter characterization, which is often accurate, illustrates why EHRs are a key component in the arsenal of public health technology tools but still primarily the tool of hospitals and medical systems, not local public health authorities. A better example of an affordable public health technology might be Twitter, which costs users nothing but is a highly effective means of disseminating key public health information. Often considered to be a public health emergency in its own right, social media channels can be tools through which public health officials can affordably disseminate information, track disease outbreaks, educate the populace, and receive feedback on initiatives and programs. Which brings us back to EHRs. Rolling up data and spitting out reports is something most EHRs can do effectively, but unless that data is shared with health information exchanges and local public health officials, it remains in a silo and is of limited value, which is at the heart of an argument for networks, interfaces, and integrated systems.