NAPHIT 2003 Annual Meeting Archive 2003

National Association for Public Health Information Technology

/ 2003 Annual Meeting Archive /

NAPHIT 2003 Annual Meeting a Success

On May 12, 2003 over 90 public health professionals gathered at the downtown Atlanta Hilton Hotel to attend the second annual NAPHIT meeting. Attendees included CIOs of state and local health agencies, staff members of non-profit public health associations, CDC informatics fellows, vendors for public health products and services, and many others.

See some pictures of the NAPHIT 2003 annual meeting.

Denton Peterson, NAPHIT president, opened the meeting with a discussion about the history of the organization and why he believed it had an important role to play in public health. David Ross, director of the Public Health Informatics Institute then explained why the Informatics Institute had selected NAPHIT as an organization they wanted to incubate. His reasoning being that NAPHIT had great potential to help the Informatics Institute achieve its objectives. Dr. Ross then introduced the first speakers, Laura Ripp and Rachel Block, who hosted an interactive session in which attendees were encouraged to express their opinions about what they believed public health directors should know about IT. The feedback will be used to help shape the contents of a workshop for public health directors. This session generated lively discussion, and many attendees took the opportunity to step up to the mike to contribute ideas.

Next followed two presentations about leading technologies being used in public health IT. First, Bill Van Hout talked about a successful implementation of eWebIT, a standards-based messaging system from Eclipsys Corporation that helped the State of Hawaii’s Department of Epidemiology pass information in real time with its partner reference labs. Marley Gray then gave the second technology-related presentation by speaking about the benefits of the Microsoft .Net architecture in a public health environment. David Bray, IT Chief of the CDC’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program wrapped up the series of presentations by discussing the informatics needs and priorities of the Laboratory Response Network (LRN) and the epidemiology needs of the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program.

Many people joked that they come to these professional meetings to make connections. The NAPHIT meeting was no exception. During breaks between presentations, attendees talked about IT and public health issues with their peers, and established new connections with others in the public health sector.

You are welcome to download PowerPoint slides of the presentations:

What You Want Your State Public Health Director to Know About IT (Laura Ripp and Rachel Block) (PPT, 209 KB).
Overcoming Information Communication Barriers Between Public Health Systems Using Standards-based Messaging (Bill Van Hout – Eclipsys)(PPT, 829 KB)
Microsoft .Net in a Public Health Environment (Marley Gray – Microsoft) (PPT, 13.1 MB)

The following presentation is intended only for the NAPHIT annual meeting and not for general distribution. Please do not copy or redistribute this presentation without permission from the author, David Bray. You may reach him by sending an email to: dbray@cdc.gov.

The Informatics Needs and Priorities of the Laboratory Response Network (LRN) and the Epidemiology Needs of the CDC’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program (David Bray – CDC) (PPT, 1.0 MB).