JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Since the introduction of the term public health informatics in the published literature in 1995, the term rapidly increased in usage within that literature up to 2001 with the peak in 2002 and a rapid decline after that. Similarly, this MeSH term was created in 2003 and showed a similar but offset trend in usage with a steady decline since 2005. Since that time, most reviews within the field have focused on specific informatics concepts or their applications within disease domains or practice areas such as disaster response.

Objective:

To characterize the current practice of public health informatics within the United States, specifically within governmental health departments.

Methods:

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines and recommendations were followed to search three databases, PubMed which is the National Library of Medicine’s biomedical literature database which includes MEDLINE among others, ProQuest’s Public Health Database, and the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health (CINAHL) database for a variety of public health informatics terms. Articles then were reviewed by two individuals in a two-tiered process first to identify compatibility with inclusion criteria and then to identify the informatics implementation and jurisdiction.

Results:

A total of 4,581 publications were identified, 141 duplicate articles across the three data sources and 25 that were published prior to 2010 were removed. Based on initial title and meta-data screening, 3,249 articles were removed. The remaining 1,166 received abstract and full-text review and resulted in 229 articles that met all eligibility criteria. Of the themes represented, 30.80% of articles included surveillance systems or disease registries and 24.05% included some aspects of health information exchange (HIE) including connecting to an HIE entity, performing direct exchange between clinical systems, or developing system interoperability. Published articles represented state health department work 32.07% of the time, followed by Federal or Tribal implementations 30.38% of the time. Implementations at local health departments were the least frequent at 16.03% of the time.

Conclusions:

There is a growing body of published literature and grey materials around public health informatics. This scoping review buttresses other published scoping reviews by providing a cross-sectional view of the ecosystem of public health informatics applied work within public health authorities in the US. This cross-sectional view can be seen as a foundation from which to further characterize practice within these authorities. The broad distribution of publications across the variety of public health jurisdictions echoes the idea that most authorities are involved in informatics work in one way of another. The variation in themes across these implementation locations can be used to refine technical assistance and training offerings by professional societies. Clinical Trial: This project was reviewed by the Institutional Review Board at East Tennessee State University and determined to not constitute human subjects research.