ABSTRACT
The accelerating adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will have profound impacts on clinical care. It will also have far-reaching implications for public health research and surveillance, which in turn could lead to changes in public policy, statutes, and regulations. This chapter highlights the public health uses of EHRs. EHR systems can report timely data that could facilitate surveillance of infectious diseases, disease outbreaks, and chronic illnesses. Software can extract data from records, analyze them, and electronically submit them to public health authorities, which will likely soon receive unprecedented amounts of information. The proliferation of available data is generating much excitement in the public health community. EHR vendors are making slow progress towards achieving interoperability, the ability of two or more systems to exchange information and to operate in a coordinated fashion. Confounding bias is a systematic error that occurs because there exists a common cause of the treatment/ exposure variable and the outcome variable.
