title: Public health surveillance and meaningful use regulations: a crisis of opportunity.
abstract: The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act is intended to enhance reimbursement of health care providers for meaningful use of electronic health records systems. This presents both opportunities and challenges for public health departments.  To earn incentive payments, clinical providers must exchange specified types of data with the public health system, such as immunization and syndromic surveillance data and notifiable disease reporting. However, a crisis looms because public health's information technology systems largely lack the capabilities to accept the types of data proposed for exchange.  Cloud computing may be a solution for public health information systems. Through shared computing resources, public health departments could reap the benefits of electronic reporting within federal funding constraints.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medicine, School of Medicine, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84132-2406, USA. Leslie.Lenert@gmail.com
authors.forename: Leslie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Lenert
authors.forename: David N
authors.initials: DN
authors.lastname: Sundwall
mesh_terms: D057171:American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; D004059:Diffusion of Innovation; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D033181:Information Dissemination / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D019451:Information Management / Q000379:methods; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D007256:Information Systems / Q000191:economics; D008498:Medical Record Linkage; D011159:Population Surveillance; D012052:Reimbursement, Incentive; D018511:Systems Integration; D014481:United States