PUBLIC HEALTH INFORMATICS TO SUPPORT PUBLIC HEALTH DECISION MAKING

Public health departments often utilize counts of reported disease cases for surveillance and monitoring . This is especially true for zoonotic diseases, infectious diseases transmittable between animals and humans. As an alternative to this traditional public health data, “translational public health” is a concept that is modeled after translational medicine and the need to translate data from the laboratory bench into knowledge that can be used at the bedside for personalized medicine and clinical decision-making. However, in translational public health, the “patient” is not an individual, but rather the population as a whole. This talk will focus on the potential of translational public health to support public health surveillance and decision making by developing an informatics system that brings sequence data of zoonotic viruses (generated from laboratories) to the forefront of public health decision-making at health departments, agriculture departments, and wildlife agencies. The system will enable these agencies to better understand the spread of disease and risk of transmission between animals and humans.