Editorial: OJPHI Vol 4, No 3 (2012)

Welcome to the last issue of the 4th volume of the Online Journal of Public Health Informatics. I am sure you are all aware that the National Library of Medicine has approved our application for indexing and archiving in PubMed Central. The next step is to deliver all past issues of the journal to NLM in the required XML DTD format. The NLM will provide links to other related biomedical informatics journals. This process will be completed in February 2013. We can all proudly say that we now have a scholarly biomedical informatics journal dedicated to the exciting field of public health informatics. This issue contains nine original articles, two review articles, a technology review, and a commentary. The topics covered in this issue include the identification of some fundamental concepts and factors that must be understood if public heath informatics applications are to support high-level cognitive activities; the development of computerized decision support systems to capture structured clinical data from providers using office-based fax machines and the delivery of just-in-time alerts to PCPs statewide; identification of information requirements and barriers to information exchange by public health workers; development of a methodology to establish and maintain successful electronic health record exchanges between clinical practices and public health agencies; the use of data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Systems surveys to study dental health disparities; the development of an develop an agent-based model to simulate the spread of sexually transmitted infections in a population; the use of institutional logics perspective to analyze the implementation of health information systems in a developing county; the development and use a modified Health Belief Model to improve the predictive power of factors that influence healthy eating behavior; an analysis of the history, issues, and potentials for successful implementation of electronic prescribing in the current health reform environment; improvement of HIV/AIDS knowledge management using electronic health records; the development of a methodology to facilitate communication between open source and propriety systems using interoperability principles; and a technology review on leveraging cloud computing to develop Smarter Public Health Prevention Systems (SPHS) to provide real-time reports of potential public health threats; and a commentary on identification of successes and challenges in the use of mobile phone applications in health and demographic surveillance systems in a developing country. It has long been noted by researchers that human and non-technical factors, rather than technological defects, contribute significantly to failures …