"More Than the Sum of Its Parts:

The Case for a Collaborative Approach"

Dave A. Ross, ScD Director, Public Health Informatics Institute

The Task Force for Child Survival and Development

May 13, 2004

Rita Anne Rollins Room, 8th Floor, RSPH of Emory University

Sponsored by

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention;

The Rollins School of Public Health of Emory University

The Emory University School of Medicine And

The Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing of Emory University

This lecture is part of the series called “Strengthening Public Health Preparedness: Technology Enhanced Teaching”. The lecture series is designed to teach participants about technology enhancements for application-based preparedness curriculum design and practice; to demonstrate how to integrate these emerging technologies easily and effectively; and to provide access to online resources to support their efforts.

Public health infrastructure and information integration have assumed a sense of urgency in the national political dialogue. Research advances, globalization, threats to the public's health, technology innovations and limited resources speak to the need for new information infrastructure. Can a federation of local and state governments fueled by federal leadership and funding build an effective information infrastructure that protects and promotes the public's health? Can a collaborative approach to defining new infrastructure work? This lecture will present the case for defining elements of the emerging public health enterprise information system through collaborative processes and will provide a case study demonstrating how we might engineer a different tomorrow. Key aspects of the lecture will include why we need to change the way we conceive software in public health and what it takes to engage the public health practice community in making this transformation successful.

Dr. David Ross is Director of the Public Health Informatics Institute. He became the Director of All Kids Count, a program of the Institute supported by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), in 2000, and subsequently began the Institute, also with funding from RWJF. His experience spans the private healthcare and public health sectors. Before joining the Task Force, Dr. Ross was an executive with a private health information systems firm, a Public Health Service officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and an executive in a private health system. Dr. Ross holds a doctoral degree in Operations Research from The Johns Hopkins University (1980) where he was involved in health services research. After serving as Director of the Health Service Research Center, Baltimore USPHS Hospital, he became Vice President for Administration with the Wyman Park Health System. In 1983, he joined the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health. During his career at CDC, he worked in environmental health, CDC’s executive administration, and public health practice. Dr. Ross was founding director of the Information Network for Public Health Officials (INPHO), CDC’s national initiative to improve the information infrastructure of public health. His research and programmatic interests reflect those of the Institute: the strategic application of information technologies to improve public health practice.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this lecture, participants will be able to:

List two reasons why organizations need to change the way software is conceived in public health; and,

Explain what it takes to make software that really works as intended.