Public Health Informatics

Barbara L. Massoudi, MPH, PhD, is an informatician and epidemiologist with more than 25 years of experience in health and public health. She is Deputy Project Director for the Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange (PHQIX) project for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Massoudi is Senior Science Advisor for the Improving Operational Efficiency and Effectiveness of Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Systems project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is the Lead Informatics Evaluator for the Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) III project for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Massoudi has led and participated in projects for AHRQ, CMS, ONC, and CDC, and has received numerous grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Her work has focused on information system design and redesign through user-centered design approaches, health information exchange for population health, public health surveillance systems, health information systems evaluation, and person health records. Dr. Massoudi is a two-time chair of the Public Health Informatics Section of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). In 2011, she chaired a participatory conference sponsored by AMIA which set the national agenda for informatics in public health, resulting in 62 recommendations within 5 areas of informatics. Dr. Massoudi has taught as an adjunct in the MSPH in Public Health Informatics program in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Emory University since 2005. Dr. Massoudi is an alumna of CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, Class of 1994, where she served with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

This book is designed to fill a current gap in the public health informatics literature by providing a resource that describes methods and best practices for conducting informatics projects in public health practice. It will provide detailed, practical approaches to the most common tasks required in public health informatics, supported by case studies when possible, and make available an online toolkit for readers to access as they venture forward to implement these approaches.