Invited Commentary: Automated Public Health Reporting-- A Familiar but Cantankerous Friend

The Electronic medical record Support for Public health (ESP) project by Klompas et al. (1) promises improved public health reporting by exploiting information captured in electronic health records. This project pulls together a number of technologies (health records, terminology maintenance, inference rules, data and transmission standards, security, text processing, and user interfaces) to create a comprehensive reporting system with a public health query feature. The initial deployment at Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates is promising.