Curated public health stories for this week from my reading shelf for Week 15 of 2023.
I.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its Public Health Data Strategy: Public Health Data Goals and 2-Year Milestones this month and also a 2022 Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) Snapshot.
Online visual summary available here.
II.
A thought-provoking piece about the growing public health workforce crisis published in Health Affairs by a group of brilliant boots-on-the-ground public health workers.
Read “We are the Public Health Workforce” from here.
“Public health agencies face significant challenges yet continue to work tirelessly to protect and save lives. Focusing solely on success stories and promoting individual resilience and self-care as the fix for sick systems puts the onus for improvement at the feet of those still being harmed by these broken systems—our public health workforce. The wounded cannot care for the wounded.”
III.
ONC released 2022 Report to Congress: Update on Access, Exchange, and Use of Electronic Health Information. The report provides the current state of the adoption of health information technology and access to electronic health information and the progress made so far. Pages 38-42 specifically cover advances made around public health data systems.
BONUS:
This article by Dr Mandar Karhade titled “Truveta LLM: FirstLarge Language Model for Electronic Health Records” is a good synopsis of a “super smart AI model that can turn electronic health records (EHR) data into billions of accurate and clean data points for research on any drug, disease, or device.” The article outlines the complexity of healthcare data and examines the use case of this particular large language model with remarkable simplicity.
Disclaimer: Posts and opinions are my own and do not reflect the views of my employer.
Jina Dcruz 