2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

The Public Health Community Platform:  
Shared Resources For Enterprise Solutions

Marcus Rennick*1, Scott Gordon1, Monica Huang1, Anita Samuel1, Paula Soper1 and Laura 
Conn2

1Informatics, Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, Arlington, VA, USA; 2Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 
Atlanta, GA, USA

Objective
To update the public health practice community on the continuing 

development of the Public Health Community Platform (PHCP).

Introduction
Public health is at a precipice of increasing demand for 

the consumption and analysis of large amounts of disparate 
data, the centralization of local and state IT offices, and the 
compartmentalization of programmatic technology solutions. Public 
health informatics needs differ across programmatic areas, but may 
have commonalities across jurisdictions. Initial development of the 
PHCP was launched with the goal of providing a shared infrastructure 
for state and local jurisdictions enabling the development of 
interoperable systems and distributed analytical methods with 
common sources of data. The PHCP is being designed to leverage 
recent successes with cloud-based technology in public health.

Success of the PHCP is dependent on the involvement of state 
and local public health jurisdictions in the transparent development 
and future direction of the platform. Equally critical to success is 
the selection of appropriate technology, consideration of various 
governance structures, and full understanding of the legal implications 
of a shared platform model.

Methods
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), 

under a cooperative agreement with the Centers for Disease Control 
and Prevention (CDC), is coordinating an ongoing national effort to 
create the framework of the PHCP. A Steering Committee (an interim 
advisory board) was initially formed to provide an overarching 
advisory role in designing various assessments and identifying 
use cases for the proposed PHCP. The Steering Committee met 
regularly, both in-person and virtually, throughout the initial phase of 
development to refine the direction of the PHCP and help guide the 
work of the assessment teams (technical, governance, communication, 
and use cases).

Results
Technical Assessment:
The MIT- Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL) provided a roadmap for 

development, an assessment of existing technology, and an expansive 
analysis of risk and mitigation for various modes of data sharing. The 
suggested roadmap focused on the premise that users adopt a system 
that serves an immediate need and improves workflow efficiency. 
This immediate need necessitates seeding any platform development 
with explicit functionality to benefit the individual user. Sharing is 
secondary.

Governance and Sustainability:
ASTHO contracted with Clinovations to identify several options 

for ownership, governance, and sustainability. Each ownership 
option (federally owned, incubated by a non-profit, or separately 
incorporated) can institute a form of governance with varying 
levels of control and community driven consensus. Advantages and 

disadvantages of several funding models were also enumerated by 
the contractor.

Communication:
Porter Novelli, a communications firm, was contracted to provide 

branding and marketing materials for the PHCP. Generally, Porter 
Novelli worked with the Steering Committee to formulate how to 
express the concept of the PHCP.

Use Cases:
Two use cases were identified by the Steering Committee: an 

ELR reportable disease decision trigger (developed by APHL) and a 
clinical decision support for immunization forecasting (conducted by 
PHII). PHII also provided a gap analysis between available tools for 
community health assessments and current needs.

Conclusions
The assessment teams provided the necessary framework to 

build a successful community-owned platform for innovative and 
collaborative public health practice. The PHCP has the potential to 
provide a single source for public health decision support solutions, 
reducing the number of redundant systems. Additionally, the platform 
could be instrumental in providing the implementation space for 
national pilot informatics projects.

The next year of development will involve implementing Steering 
Committee decisions, prioritizing use cases that can be advanced 
as pilots, and building the technical architecture and community to 
support those pilots.

Figure 1. PHCP Development Roadmap

Keywords
Platform; Informatics; Enterprise; Solutions; interoperability

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the tremendous amount of effort from our 
steering committee members.

*Marcus Rennick

E-mail: mrennick@astho.org    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 7(1):e2, 2015