Public health programs and policy are often defined at regional and national levels, but community is, literally, where prevention and intervention take place. (MacQueen, 2001) The link between disease management and local community services is not new. In 1854 a cholera outbreak occurred in London. A Mr. John Snow took a map of the area affected and drew bars representing deaths that occurred. The map showed a concentration of bars near a water pump station on Broad Street. He published the map and presented it to city officials who he convinced to close the Broad Street Pump Station, which resulted in stopping of the spread of the epidemic. This was the seminal event that gave us the disciplines of epidemiology and medical geography.
Today we have social media and other information age tools like “Google’s Flu Trends (GFT) which uses search engine query data to estimate influenza activity (Dugas, 2011) and Facebook to help track epidemics and deploy medical aid more quickly. “Social media is here to stay and we have to take advantage of it,” says Taha Kass-Hout, Deputy Director for Information Science at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. (Rowland, 2012)
The mission of public health data infrastructure flows in both directions, which is the very definition of Web 2.0 and social media. These mission areas include:
Education and Outreach to local communities:
– Social media and target media (e.g., Toll-free lines, Facebook, Twitter)
– Mobile health screenings
– Partnerships with personal health providers to reinforce public health promotions
– Targeted health information to high risk populations
Data analysis from data collected at the community and private practice level can be implemented with:
– Monitoring of community health status to identify health problems
– Attention to the health status of specific groups that are at higher risk than the total population
– Collaboration to manage integrated information systems with private providers and health benefit plans
Public health is also dependent on the enforcement of laws that protect public health by enforcing laws and regulations that protect health and ensure safety, enforcement of sanitary codes. Integrating public health and with other community services is nothing new; The tools that can be used to facilitate this collaboration however are new. Salmonella tainted spinach at a bistro can be discovered more quickly with the help of social media. Flu outbreaks can be discovered earlier than ever before and public health information can be disseminated quickly.
Dugas, A. F., Hsiehl, Y., Levin, S., Pines, J., Mareinissi, D., Moharebi, A., et al. (2011). Google Flu Trends: Correlation with Emergency Department Influenza Rates and Crowding Metrics. Clinical Infectious Diseases, 54(4), 463-469.
Rowland, K. (2012). Epidemiologists put social media in the spotlight. Nature International Journal of Science, 9.
MacQueen, K., McLellan, E., Metzger, D., Kegeles, S., Strauss, R., Scotti, R., et al. (2001). What Is Community? An Evidence-Based Definition for Participatory Public Health. American Journal of Public Health, 91(12), 1929-1938. Retrieved September 30, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles