Big Data in the Era of Health Information Exchanges: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Health

Public health surveillance of communicable diseases depends on timely, complete, accurate, and useful data that are collected across a number of healthcare and public health systems. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) which support electronic sharing of data and information between health care organizations are recognized as a source of ‘big data’ in healthcare and have the potential to provide public health with a single stream of data collated across disparate systems and sources. However, given these data are not collected specifically to meet public health objectives, it is unknown whether a public health agency’s (PHA’s) secondary use of the data is supportive of or presents additional barriers to meeting disease reporting and surveillance needs. To explore this issue, we conducted an assessment of big data that is available to a PHA—laboratory test results and clinician-generated notifiable condition report data—through its participation in a HIE.