Bridging Data for Better Health: The Power of Integrated Public Health Information Systems
- Alyssa Johnson
- Jul 9, 2025
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 11, 2025
Integrated Public Health Information Systems (PHIS)
Promising practices for bridging the gap between healthcare delivery and public health increasingly rely on integrated information systems and advanced technologies. These systems allow for seamless data exchange, real-time surveillance, and coordinated care across providers, public health agencies, and community stakeholders. This connectivity is essential for addressing public health crises, improving clinical outcomes, and managing population health more effectively.
The Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS), is a comparative database managed by the Children's Hospital Association. PHIS collects and analyzes clinical and resource utilization data across approximately 50 children’s hospitals in the United States, encompassing inpatient, emergency department (ED), ambulatory surgery, and observation unit encounters. This integration enables more complete patient records and supports a variety of performance improvement activities, including clinical effectiveness evaluations, antimicrobial stewardship, readmission analysis, and physician profiling (Children’s Hospital Association, n.d.).
The PHIS platform illustrates how integrated public health information systems (PHIS) can enhance both individual and population-level care. By offering executive-level dashboards, over 100 standard reports, and the ability to drill down into hospital-specific trends, PHIS provides actionable insights that inform quality improvement initiatives, guide care standardization, and support data-driven policy decisions. Hospitals can benchmark outcomes, track clinical performance, and collaborate on best practices to drive system-wide improvement.
As the healthcare landscape continues to embrace value-based care and community-oriented health interventions, systems like PHIS demonstrate how data integration and analytics can serve as a strategic bridge between clinical care and public health priorities—improving patient outcomes while supporting resource stewardship and public health readiness.
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs)
Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) enable the secure electronic transfer of clinical information across various healthcare institutions, allowing patient data to be available wherever care is delivered. By fostering interoperability between providers, HIEs help minimize redundant testing, enhance care continuity, and equip public health agencies with real-time data necessary for effective monitoring and response efforts (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology [ONC], 2022).
The Health Information Exchange (HIE) Viewer is a groundbreaking innovation in healthcare information technology designed to revolutionize the way healthcare professionals access and share patient data. As featured in the video, the HIE Viewer offers a national-scale, interoperable platform that integrates electronic health records across over 80,000 facilities, handling more than 250 million transactions daily. It empowers clinicians with real-time, system-wide access to patient histories, prescriptions, and care needs—streamlining workflows, reducing medical errors, and improving patient outcomes. The HIE Viewer prioritizes patient privacy while enhancing personalized care, cost-effectiveness, and healthcare coordination. With features such as seamless data integration, customizable access controls, and advanced analytics, it is positioned as a key driver in shaping a smarter, more connected, and patient-centered healthcare future.
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with Interoperability Standards
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are digital systems that store a patient’s health information, like their medical history, medications, test results, and more. These records can be shared with doctors, nurses, specialists, and public health officials, helping everyone involved in a patient’s care stay informed and make better decisions faster.
To make sure different healthcare systems can work together, we use interoperability standards. These are rules that help computers “speak the same language.” Two of the most common standards are FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and HL7 (Health Level Seven). These allow hospitals, clinics, and public health agencies to send and receive health information in ways all systems can understand.
For example, FHIR helps developers build apps that connect easily with EHR systems. HL7 is widely used around the world to send billions of healthcare messages every day. These standards help reduce repeated tests, prevent mistakes, and ensure patients and providers have access to complete and up-to-date information.
During health emergencies like COVID-19, interoperable EHRs made it easier to track hospitalizations, case numbers, and vaccinations. This helped public health leaders respond more quickly and make better decisions based on data.
As healthcare becomes more digital, making sure EHR systems can work well together is essential to improving both patient care and public health (Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology [ONC], 2020).
Interoperability in Healthcare Systems
The video Achieving Interoperability Between Healthcare Systems by InterSystems explains how important it is for different healthcare technologies to work together. It breaks down two key ideas: syntactic interoperability, which means making sure systems can share data in the same format (like HL7 V2 or FHIR), and semantic interoperability, which means all systems understand the data the same way.
For example, if three hospitals write down “suspected lung cancer” in different ways, it can be hard to tell they’re talking about the same issue. This can cause confusion or delays in care. The video shows that using shared standards—like FHIR profiles that computers can read and understand—helps fix this problem by making it easier for healthcare systems to "speak the same language."
The main takeaway is that real success in interoperability needs both smart technology and agreement between people (like doctors, IT teams, and hospital leaders) to use the same data standards. That way, healthcare teams can work together better and give patients safer, more connected care.
Syndromic Surveillance and Its Impact During COVID-19
What is Syndromic Surveillance?
Syndromic surveillance is an essential public health strategy that uses real-time or near real-time data—often from emergency departments, urgent care centers, and other healthcare settings—to track health trends and detect potential disease outbreaks. Instead of waiting for laboratory-confirmed diagnoses, this method identifies clusters of symptoms (or "syndromes") such as fever, cough, or shortness of breath. This allows for earlier detection of health threats and faster public health responses (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2022a).
Syndromic Surveillance in Action: COVID-19
During the COVID-19 pandemic, syndromic surveillance played a vital role in monitoring and responding to the rapidly spreading virus. The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), managed by the CDC in collaboration with state and local health departments, gathered and analyzed real-time data from emergency departments across the United States. This data was used to identify trends in symptoms consistent with COVID-19, helping public health officials detect early outbreaks—especially at a time when testing resources were limited (CDC, 2022a).
ESSENCE
A major tool within the NSSP is ESSENCE (Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics). ESSENCE helps public health professionals visualize and analyze data trends, identify anomalies, and respond quickly to possible outbreaks. It provided a critical early warning system by tracking COVID-like illness and respiratory conditions at local and national levels (CDC, 2022b).
Beyond COVID-19: Innovation Through AI and Technology
In addition to government-led systems, private-sector innovations also contributed significantly to pandemic response. For instance, BlueDot, a digital health company, uses artificial intelligence and big data analytics to track and predict the global spread of infectious diseases. BlueDot monitors over 200 infectious diseases using natural language processing in more than 65 languages and analyzes over 100,000 sources daily. On December 31, 2019, BlueDot was among the first to identify the outbreak of a pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, China. The platform accurately predicted several of the first cities outside China to report COVID-19 cases (World Economic Forum, 2020).
Lindsay Bryson, Chief Operating Officer at BlueDot, emphasized that we are entering a new era where proactive, real-time technologies are necessary for outbreak preparedness. Systems like BlueDot not only enhance healthcare system readiness but also inform public policy and support faster response coordination (World Economic Forum, 2020).
The Importance of Seamless Data Sharing
Tools like NSSP, ESSENCE, and BlueDot show the importance of integrating digital surveillance technologies across healthcare systems. These platforms create a bridge between healthcare delivery and public health by enabling seamless data flow, real-time alerts, and faster, community-level decision-making. As global health threats become more common, syndromic surveillance systems offer scalable solutions that enhance preparedness, improve communication, and reduce the burden of disease across healthcare settings.
How the CDC’s NSSP Is Catching Outbreaks Before They Start
Imagine being able to spot a public health emergency before it becomes one. That’s the mission behind the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), a real-time health tracking system run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
So, what exactly is syndromic surveillance? It’s the process of collecting and analyzing health data (like ER visits or urgent care symptoms) to detect unusual patterns—before official lab results come in. This means faster warnings, smarter decisions, and healthier communities.
A Nationwide Early Warning System
Here’s how the NSSP works:
Data flows in from over 6,900 facilities nationwide—covering every U.S. state, D.C., and Guam.
It captures more than 9.6 million messages every day, like symptoms of flu, COVID-like illness, injuries, or drug overdoses.
Information is processed and available to health officials within 24 hours—that’s lightning fast in the world of public health.
Over 80% of emergency departments in the U.S. are already participating.
All this data goes to the BioSense Platform, a secure, cloud-based system that helps public health teams identify trends and act quickly.
Real-Life Wins
This isn’t just about data, it’s about impact. NSSP has helped:
Monitor spikes in opioid overdoses by neighborhood
Detect illness clusters after mass gatherings
Support emergency response after natural disasters
Guide foodborne illness investigations that led to product recalls
Whether it’s flu season or a festival weekend, NSSP helps communities stay ahead of the curve.
A Collaborative Network
NSSP isn’t a solo act. It thrives on teamwork—bringing together CDC experts, state and local health departments, hospitals, and data scientists. Together, they analyze patterns, share findings, and improve response strategies across the country.
Bottom line: The NSSP is like a high-tech watchtower for public health. And as the world faces more frequent health threats, having early-warning systems like this one can mean the difference between isolated illness and widespread outbreak.
🔗 Learn more at cdc.gov/nssp
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References
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022a). ESSENCE: Early notification of community-based epidemics. https://www.cdc.gov/nssp/essence.html
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022b). How we conduct syndromic surveillance. https://www.cdc.gov/nssp/php/about/how-we-conduct-syndromic-surveillance.html
Children’s Hospital Association. (n.d.). Leverage your data with CHA's Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS). https://www.childrenshospitals.org/content/analytics/product-program/pediatric-health-information-system
Health Information Exchange Viewer. (2024, March 19). Transforming patient care: Discover the Health Information Exchange Viewer [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3GNgyq0U4E
InterSystems. (2022, September 8). Achieving interoperability between healthcare systems [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us6W4ppN9SA
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. (2020). Connecting health and care for the nation: A shared nationwide interoperability roadmap. https://www.healthit.gov/sites/default/files/hie-interoperability-roadmap.pdf
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. (2022). Health information exchange. https://www.healthit.gov/topic/health-it-and-health-information-exchange-basics/health-information-exchange
World Economic Forum. (2020, September 14). How AI predicted the coronavirus outbreak before it happened [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK47lIJodS0
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