Informatica

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From Intervention Informatics to Prevention Informatics
Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology – October/November 2011 – Volume 38, Number 1

by Sherrilynne Fuller

EDITOR’S SUMMARY The contributions of the information science community to health care are significant, especially through systems supporting clinical care for individual patients, anintervention informatics approach. Though valuable, this strategy is reactive, fails to account for numerous environmental factors affecting personal health and falls short of enhancing human health on a broader scale. An unmet challenge with abundant opportunity lies in prevention informatics, a proactive approach drawing on information science and technologies to deliver greater health gains at apopulation level. Prevention informatics is marked by a high degree social interactivity in real time, with technologies to bring together disparate data and represent it in an integrated and meaningful way as the basis for action. The approach relies on standards for classifying information, systematic knowledge management and improved methods to collect, mine and visualize data. Tools andsoftware are already in use in locations around the world, relying on smartphone technology and geographic information systems to share community health information and location data. Further advances in prevention informatics will require adoption of common terminologies, visualization tools and GIS mapping, and optimized data exchange to support rapid prevention response. KEYWORDS medical informaticsbiomedical information medical science mobile applications geospatial information electronic visualization controlled vocabularies

s we all know too well, the world has entered an age of superabundant information – with devices spewing out masses of text and data ranging from consumer shopping patterns to life-saving laboratory results, weather and flight patterns and more mundane data likeFacebook updates about friends and acquaintances. As the amount of information generated globally increases exponentially, we become ever more dependent on computers and information systems to make sense of it. In no area of human endeavor is this sense-making more vital than in the area of human health. A key challenge related to sense-making in human health has to do with conquering the physicaland intellectual divide between clinical data and information (related to a single patient – intervention) and public health data and information (that related to groups of patients, communities and populations) in support of prevention. This latter area of intellectual endeavor I have named “prevention” informatics. In this paper I will outline a number of opportunities for information scientiststo contribute fresh approaches to bridging the data and disciplinary gaps that impede progress in prevention informatics today. Why is prevention important? Over the past 100 years a health system has developed in the United States that dramatically reduces death rates –

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Based on the First Annual American Society for Information Science & Technology Award Lecture presented at the School ofLibrary and Information Science, University of Kentucky, April 11, 2011.

Sherrilynne Fuller is professor, biomedical and health informatics, School of Medicine; professor, Information School; and co-director, Center for Public Health Informatics, School of Public Health, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Her research and teaching focuses on the development and appropriateapplication of information systems and technologies for disease prevention and health improvement in resource constrained settings across the world. She served as member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and co-chair of the Subcommittee on Health from 1997-2002. She can be reached at sfulleruw.edu.

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