Public Health Information Standards

Standards are one of the most efficient ways to prevent data silos, achieve system interoperability, and promote the value of data. Public health's growing use of electronic data interchange lends increasing urgency to the need to adopt and promote standards, and to participate in standards development as a fully-engaged partner.However, public health and its many partners must agree upon both the selection and value of standards in order to overcome the significant barriers and challenges to standards adoption. Implementation of standards is complex and resource-intensive, sometimes unevenly more so for one of the partners involved in data interchange.In this chapter, standards are categorized into process standards and data or content standards. After reviewing a number of the most common standards utilized in public health, we focus in more depth upon three of the most important - HL7 (R), LOINC (R), and SNOMED CT (R).