Advancing Public Health Standards for Data Exchange and Reporting

Overview

A central challenge of public health reporting—which has become clearer during the pandemic—are differences in reporting requirements among state and federal programs and local jurisdictions and the need to respond quickly to new requirements. Working through these differences with vendors, providers, and public health agencies can be complex and burdensome.

How do we simplify it? As members of the HL7 Public Health Work Group, we help states and the larger reporting community develop and use HL7 standards to improve statewide data exchange and public health interoperability. HL7 is a nonprofit organization that provides a framework and standard for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information.

Approach

The HL7 Public Health Work Group is comprised of interoperability and subject matter experts from the nonprofit, private, and governmental sectors who provide support and guidance to states and other organizations using the standard.

As members of the group, we provide guidance to organizations developing and applying standards to meet new or evolving reporting requirements in areas such as population health monitoring; immunization; vital records; outbreak investigation; disease and event detection, response, and control; and reporting to regulatory and monitoring agencies.

The Work Group also provides a broader forum for discussing the interoperability needs of government agencies seeking to use health information from different sources to improve population health.