National Association for Public Health Information Technology (IT)

The National Association for Public Health Information Technology (NAPHIT) is the dream organization that cares deeply about everything I have on this blog- I'm sort of disappointed that I had not explored them more until now. They came into existence in response to the masses of people that became very concerned about public health emergencies in the likes of bio-terrorism, after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Today they work towards a set of carefully laid out goals and objectives:

• To promote discussion and group action on issues involving public health information policy.
• To assist in the evaluation, selection and implementation of information technology in support of public health programs.
• To encourage professional development of leaders in public health information technology through training, education and the exchange of ideas.
• To further the role of information technology in public health by building relationships and collaborating with federal, state, and local public health agencies and other organizations that share our goals.

They are funded by a variety of organizations such as Microsoft, Novell, Northrop Gummen, Citrix, but two interesting ones among them are Advanced Business Software, an organization that focuses exclusively on developing and implementing information management software solutions for clients in the public health market, and HLN Consulting, LLC, a health information technology services company that provides a wide range of technology consulting services to public health agencies and their non-profit partners, in an effort to develop and support robust technical solutions addressing pressing public health needs. It is definitely a positive sign that many of these business are realizing the importance of combining their efforts and collaborating with one another to fund a national not-for-profit organization to accomplish these goals.

NAPHIT is headquartered in Baltimore, and in March 2009, formed an alliance with the Public Health Data Standards Consortium (PHDSC) to establish a Leadership Forum that is working to design and implement programs and activities that will allow public health IT leaders, public health and clinical professionals, as well as vendors to come together to standardize IT initiatives and allow interoperability between public health information systems and clinical information systems under the National Health Information Network (NHIN).

All of these initiatives are encouraging steps forward in the field of public health information technology. It is exciting to note the progress that has been made so far, and much is to be said about the potential for the future in the US- keeping in mind that many developing nations have yet to even recognize the importance of leveraging information technology to address public health needs. If an organization like NAPHIT is successful at building efficient models to introduce functional IT systems into public health within a highly disintegrated health care system, as is in the US, then there is hope for scalability and the replication of such efforts worldwide.