Public Health and Emergency Response
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Background
Many HL7 standards have been developed to serve the needs of clinical care of individual patients. Events worldwide have clearly demonstrated the need for standards-based exchange of population health and health-related information. Bioterrorism events, environmental catastrophes, the emergence of new or altered infectious agents, and rising levels of international travel all increase the focus on the health of populations- domestic or international, human or animal. This population-based emphasis includes public health and environmental monitoring, food safety activities, disease control, outbreak detection, and coordinated response. Population-based activities frequently require interaction with agencies not usually considered part of the health care domain, including law enforcement.
Development, balloting, and maintaining a growing number of domain analysis models and version 2 and version 3 messages, documents and services for public health and emergency preparedness warrants a focused work group. It is anticipated that participants from international, national/federal, regional, state and local governments, contractors, and other subject matter experts would work together through PHER. The scope and activities of PHER would differ from, but complement, the work and information sharing in other work groups that involve government agencies such as the Patient Safety, Service Oriented Architecture, Electronic Health Records, Regulated Clinical Research Information Management, Government Projects, and others.
Mission
The PHER work group supports the HL7 mission to create and promote its standards by helping to assure that HL7 V2 and V3 models, messages, documents and services address the requirements of the many public health agencies, both governmental and non-governmental. Specific areas of interest include:
- human and animal population health monitoring,
- disease and event detection, response and control
- contact and cohort tracing and identification,
- outbreak investigation,
- legal issues including isolation and quarantine,
- immunization,
- vital records,
- public health registries,
- food safety,
- environmental health,
- emergency preparedness and response,
- reporting to monitoring and regulatory agencies.
The messages, documents, and services developed by this work group may also be used to communicate local, state and national health summary information to international monitoring bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).
Charter
Work Products and Contributions to HL7 Processes
The PHER work group will provide a joint forum for HL7 members to discuss and develop models, messages, documents and services related to its mission. The work group will specifically take into account the need for real-time interactions and the experiences of existing national and international interoperability initiatives.
Formal Relationships With Other HL7 Groups
Since the scope of population-based care encompasses both cohorts of patients and individual patients in the context of a cohort, the PHER work group will work closely with Patient Care, Orders and Observations, RCRIM, Service-Oriented Architecture, Patient Safety, Structured Documents and Vocabulary to manage its scope and deliverables in order to ensure consistency, maximize reuse of current content, and minimize duplicative efforts by the respective groups.
Formal Relationship With Groups Outside of HL7
There are no formal relationships with groups outside of HL7. The PHER work group will provide a forum for discussion of interoperability needs by all agencies and organizations currently interested in using health and health-related information from disparate sources for population-based activities. This includes public, veterinary and environmental health agencies and organizations at all levels of government and other organizations (e.g. American Immunization Registry Association, Canada Health Infoway, World Health Organization, etc.). Other interested international groups are encouraged to participate and contribute to the efforts of the work group.
Decision Making Practices
Date of Last Revision
March 31, 2011