Utah

Public health informatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field that uses information technology and informatics methods to meet public health goals. To achieve these goals, education and training of a new generation of public health informaticians is one of the essential components. AMIA0 s 10 ! 10 program aims to realize the goal of training 10,000 health care professionals in applied health and medical informatics by the year 2010.1 The Department of Biomedical Informatics of the University of Utah was established in 1964. As one of the largest biomedical informatics training programs in the world, the department is internationally recognized as a leader in biomedical informatics research and education.2 The poster hereby describes the collaborative effort between Utah and AMIA to develop a public health informatics online course.

Objective

This poster describes the development and delivery of an online American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) 10 ! 10 Public Health Informatics course at the University of Utah.

Surveillance of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia using death records has the potential to be a relatively inexpensive and quick approach to tracking and detecting influenza and respiratory illness outbreaks; however, presently such a system does not exist because of the time delays in processing death records: in Utah, as is similar elsewhere in the United States, coded death certificate data are typically not available for at least 1–3 months after the date of death, and coded national vital statistics data are not available until after 2–3 years.

Objective

This poster presents the rationale for designing a real-time surveillance system, based on mortality data, using grid and natural language processing tools that will address the current barrier that coded death certificate data not being available for several months. To develop a public health tool that delivers a timely surveillance system for influenza and pneumonia, we integrated death certificates from the Utah Department of Health, analytical grid services, and natural language processing tools to monitor levels of mortality. This example demonstrates how local, state, and national authorities can automate their influenza and pneumonia surveillance system, and expand the number of reporting cities.

Cryptosporidiosis is a gastrointestinal illness due to a protozoan parasite that is highly contagious, and resistant to multiple disinfectants. Utah experienced a large, community-wide outbreak of cryptosporidiosis between June and December of 2007. During this time period, the Utah Department of Health received reports of 1,902 laboratory confirmed cryptosporidiosis cases across the state.2 Nearly 40% of these cases occurred in Salt Lake County (SL County), Utah. In past years, SL County averaged fewer than five cases annually; however, the incidence rate in the county for this entire outbreak was 125.9 per 100,000 person–years.

Objective

The objective of this study was to investigate if prospectively applied space-time surveillance could have detected significant, emerging clusters as cryptosporidiosis, cases were reported to the Salt Lake Valley Health Department during the 2007 outbreak.

Epidemiological information realized by modern disease surveillance systems offers great potential for supporting clinical decision-making. Providing health practitioners with population-based, pathogen-specific information about regional communicable infectious disease epidemiology can engender enhanced knowledge about specific pathogens, which may, in turn, lead to improved clinical performance. To enhance the pathogen-specificity of Utah’s surveillance system, which includes tracking syndromes and notifiable diseases, we developed a system that tracks microbiologic testing in Utah’s largest health care delivery system.

Objective

The objective of this study is to describe a system 'Germ Watch' that provides information about the regional activity of common communicable infectious diseases.