When the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services asked, "What's the digital capacity capabilities of a state public health system?" it embarked on a data modernization and landscape assessment, said Anne Snowdon, HIMSS chief scientific research officer. 

"When we think of healthcare, we think, 'What's your diagnosis?' We don't think front and center quite as often, 'How healthy is our population? Who's at the greatest risk, and how do we reduce that risk?'" said Snowdon.

She explained that the department turned to the Digital Health Indicator to understand the maturity of Missouri's 59 public health agencies, finding a high degree of variability. That exercise is helping the agency forge ahead in creating the kind of health data interoperability that could provide answers to the numerous unanswered population health questions. 

Snowdon will join Paula Nickelson, director of the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, along with other public health officials involved in the data maturity discovery effort, on a panel at next month's HIMSS25 in Las Vegas.

The session focuses on "the importance of not only identifying what's our digital capacity, but how do we better connect all of the different dots in the health system?" Snowdon said.

Bringing public health data into focus

Digital Health Indicator highlights how your system is currently performing across the four dimensions of digital health and identifies actionable next steps. Missouri now has "evidence and data to inform where do you invest to get the most effective and most progress in a data-driven public health system," Snowdon told Healthcare IT News. (HITN is a HIMSS Media publication.)

The panel session, "State-Level Public Health and the Journey Toward Digital Maturity," will dive into the state's discoveries, vision and strategies and why a public health data infrastructure is so important.

Public health is "often not front and center when we talk about digital health," Snowdon noted. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, the healthcare sector learned quickly how critical public health understanding of virus transmission rates needed to be.

"We had no idea who the next 150 patients that were going to come in through the doors with serious COVID that was life-threatening," she said.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University created a modeling software that ultimately became the North American tracking system to help decipher trends in where spikes were and what to expect.

"But that was built and created on the fly, out of a total vacuum of digital and data infrastructure that we should have and need to have," Snowdon said.

Indexing to solve the data puzzle 

While the need to track infectious illnesses like flu and RSV and rarer diseases, such as bird flu or Mpox, is a more obvious purview of public health, the logic extends to the need to understand the rates of other factors affecting populations, according to Snowdon. 

"We don't necessarily have the digital infrastructure to inform and proactively identify where the health threats to our population are," she said.

One example is premature birth, which bears on the morbidity of our child population, she said. "It's driven by maternal health." 

To answer questions of how to mitigate various population health risks, the sector needs to unearth where human health vulnerabilities lay.

The Digital Health Indicator measures governance, workforce interoperability, analytics capacity and how connected systems are to the people they serve to benchmark what systems need to get there. 

However, analytics is relatively underdeveloped in most global health systems, Snowdon noted. If data is "written on paper, you can't translate data into knowledge and insights to informed decisions," she said. "You don't exactly know that data represents the population you are focused on. That's a challenge."

Snowdon's panel session, "State-Level Public Health and the Journey Toward Digital Maturity," is scheduled for Tuesday, March 4, from 2-3 p.m. at HIMSS25 in Las Vegas.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.