Obesity Atlas and Methodbox: Towards an open framework for sharing public health intelligence workflows

The large growth in data sources relevant to public health has not been matched by a growth in human resource for producing intelligence to support decisions or generate new insights. There is a need to bring scarce public health expertise into closer alignment with data and data processing methods to support timely public health analysis. The difficulties of developing and sharing this expertise in large organisations such as the UK's National Health Service have long been recognised. We report findings in this area across two projects Obesity Atlas and Methodbox, which are developing and sharing best practice between Public Health Analysts in England, and we address the relevant generic knowledge management problems in the Public Health community.