Design and Performance of A Public Health Preparedness Informatics Framework

Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) seeks to achieve and maintain a state of “readiness” within the community of response partners to detect, respond to, and mitigate health emergencies, such as large-scale infectious disease outbreaks. The activities, workflows, and information exchanges in this process are optimized when embedded as a part of routine public health practice. Information systems supporting PHEP “readiness” are also optimized when embedded within an informatics framework supporting a community of information trading partners engaged in routine (day-to-day) health information exchange. This chapter describes the attributes of a model informatics framework for support of PHEP; evaluates its performance during a full-scale exercise simulating an outbreak of a highly infectious novel strain of influenza; and discusses how the attributes of the framework contributed to the state of readiness in the response community.