Toward Standardized, Comparable Public Health Systems Data: A Taxonomic Description of Essential Public Health Work

Abstract

Objective. To identify taxonomy of task, knowledge, and resources for documenting the work performed in local health departments (LHDs). Data Sources. Secondary data were collected from documents describing public health (PH) practice produced by organizations representing the PH community. Study Design. A multistep consensus-based method was used that included literature review, data extraction, expert opinion, focus group review, and pilot testing. Data Extraction Methods. Terms and concepts were manually extracted from documents, consolidated, and evaluated for scope and sufficiency by researchers. An expert panel determined suitability of terms and a hierarchy for classifying them. This work was validated by practitioners and results pilot tested in two LHDs. Principal Findings. The finalized taxonomy was applied to compare a national sample of 11 LHDs. Data were obtained from 1,064 of 1,267 (84 percent) of employees. Frequencies of tasks, knowledge, and resources constitute a profile of PH work. About 70 percent of the correlations between LHD pairs on tasks and knowledge were high (40.7), suggesting between-department commonalities. On resources only 16 percent of correlations between LHD pairs were high, suggesting a source of performance variability. Conclusions. A taxonomy of PH work serves as a tool for comparative research and a framework for further development.

A Comparative Study of 11 Local Health Department Organizational Networks

“…17 The survey was administered electronically to all employees of the sample LHDs ( N = 1 267). A paper option was available for those without Internet access.…”

“…17 Each employee was asked to indicate from a list containing the following: 44 tasks , those assigned to him or her as part of normal work; 53 knowledge items , those for which he or she possessed better than average knowledge; and 54 resources , those readily available when needed for daily work.…”

Beyond information access: Support for complex cognitive activities in public health informatics tools

“…Public health professionals work with a variety of information sources to carry out their everyday activities. For instance, in a recent study of public health systems, Merrill and colleagues [2] report professionals’ top ten tasks by time spent; six of these tasks involve working directly with information (e.g., internet use and data reporting), and the remaining four involve information use mediated by interpersonal communication (e.g., telephone use and meeting with clients). Furthermore, many of the tasks associated with public health risk analysis and clinician-population relationship management involve extensive information collection, analysis, synthesis, and management [3, 4].…”

Public Health Practice within a Health Information Exchange: Information Needs and Barriers to Disease Surveillance

“…While the information needs and work of public health practitioners have been the subject of several studies (9–12), existing studies of HIEs are primarily physician- and hospital-focused (13–17). Little work has been done to characterize the information practice of public health workers with regard to the exchange of health information within public health organizations or with external stakeholders.…”