Web portal offers access to public health data

Without detailed insight into the vast and diverse world of public health, even the most intrepid researcher looking for insightful data would soon be lost in a maze of agencies, government bodies and disparate databases.

But an emerging information technology tool known as the Public Health Information Network, formerly the Health Alert Network, promises university researchers, public health officials, emergency responders and others unprecedented access to the trove of public health data now being collected and made available online, some of it for the first time.

In Wisconsin, the network has been gradually brought to life since 1999 through a partnership fostered by the Centers for Disease Control, the Wisconsin Department of Public Health and UW–Madison’s Division of Information Technology. Described as the “Weather Channel of public health information,” the network is available through https://www.han.wisc.edu. This portal can link communities of public health officials, researchers, hospitals, clinicians, and fire and police.

PHIN has an estimated 2,500 users representing 900 affiliated organizations, including hospital infection control officers, local emergency management, medical school researchers and local public health agencies, says Lawrence P. Hanrahan, senior epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, he is lead investigator for the $3.5 million CDC grant that supports PHIN, much of which has gone to local public health agencies for equipment and training.

Even in 1999, bioterrorism was the impetus for PHIN at the federal level, according to Hanrahan, and the effort picked up steam after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the subsequent anthrax letter attacks. In the event of terrorism or, more likely, a natural outbreak of disease, PHIN is intended to serve as an emergency communication tool for first responders and public health officials.

The site, according to George Pasdirtz, a DoIT consultant to PHIN, meets rigorous security standards, and it conforms to state and federal statutes, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that prescribe security and privacy protocols for personal health information.

The potential of such a tool is almost limitless, says Hanrahan, who also serves as a UW-Madison Medical School adjunct professor of population health sciences. For example, as coroners and medical examiners sign off on an estimated 10,000 of the 40,000 deaths that occur in Wisconsin each year, they can begin to build comprehensive databases and geographic profiles of such things as occupational-related deaths, firearm fatalities and diseases like sudden infant death syndrome.

“If you are interested in injury fatalities, you’re going to have just about everything in that database,” Hanrahan says.

For the university researcher, Hanrahan says, desktop access to that kind of data will underpin opportunities for follow-up studies that would have been far more difficult, or impossible, if the information were scattered around the state.

Among other things, says Hanrahan, “PHIN is an infrastructure to do automated health research at a population-level from your desktop.”