How Public Health Informatics Helps Build Healthier Communities

Public health informatics powers change. This field sits at the intersection of technology and population health and is transforming how communities detect, respond to, and prevent health threats.

Public health informatics is the interdisciplinary and systematic application of information and technology to support public health goals. It’s at play all the time, whether you realize it or not. This could be:  

•    During a disease outbreak
•    When an emergency room sees a surge of strange new symptoms
•    When public health officials need to design data-informed public health interventions  
•    And more  

Public health informatics focuses on the collection, organization, analysis, and communication of health data to inform timely decision-making and improve population health. It applies insights from fields like computer science, data analytics and public health to improve public health outcomes through disease surveillance, prevention, and health promotion.

As public health challenges grow more complex, the need for sophisticated data systems becomes more critical.  

Learning More About a Growing Field

Public health informatics is a growing field, with a job outlook that is expected to grow by 15% by 2034—much faster than most other occupations. Professionals trained in public health informatics are becoming essential to protecting community health and building the digital infrastructure that allows communities to detect threats early, respond effectively, and enable disease prevention—in settings including government, healthcare, nonprofits, and the private sector.  

Adele Stewart is Health Informatics Manager at Emory Healthcare, and is also an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management for the Rollins MHA program. She says that several roles in this field are particularly well-suited for MPH graduates, including population health informatics professionals in healthcare organizations that identify high-risk patients, analyze care gaps, and support value-based care programs, as well as research informatics professionals and regulatory oversight professionals who ensure operations are sound from a legal and compliance perspective.  

Students interested in entering the field can pursue an MPH with an informatics concentration, offered through the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Rollins. Rollins’ new MHA program offers a digital-forward healthcare management concentration, including training in healthcare informatics. The CDC offers a Public Health Informatics Fellowship Program that provides advanced training. The American Medical Informatics Association maintains a public health informatics track and offers student memberships.

Stewart notes that technology is important to understand well because it permeates the entire healthcare industry. “Whether a student decides to work in informatics and technology or not, it has a through-line across everything that takes place within a healthcare organization. Degrees that we offer right here at Rollins will prepare graduates to understand the patients behind the data and be effective leaders in tech-forward organizations like Emory Healthcare.” 

Using Cosmos Data to Support Public Health at Emory Healthcare 

Stewart works across Emory's clinical, research, and public health teams on the data systems and workforce development that support public health decision-making. This includes monitoring how health data is collected, shared, and used to manage population health while ensuring records are de-identified, preserving capacity for meaningful analysis while protecting individual patient privacy.

She's also leading the effort to build out infrastructure and expertise that bridges public health informatics and patient care workflows through the Epic Cosmos dataset. Cosmos is a platform that pools de-identified records from health systems running on Epic's electronic health record software into a single standardized dataset, giving researchers the opportunity to drive new discoveries and improve patient care. It pools clinical records from 304 million patients across more than 2,000 hospitals and nearly 50,000 clinics — representing 15.7 billion encounters. Epic Cosmos has the capability to support chronic disease surveillance, syndromic surveillance for emerging infectious threats, immunization monitoring, and health services research.

The records Cosmos draws from are longitudinal, which means it integrates inpatient and outpatient data into a single record that follows patients as they move between health systems. The dataset also reliably collects data on race and ethnicity, which means it can identify health disparities that are often missing in other datasets.

The depth of data provided through Cosmos makes it possible to ask population-level questions that no single institution could answer on its own. A research question that might take years through a traditional clinical study can be explored across hundreds of millions of patient records in far less time, and findings can be cross-checked against other data systems to confirm whether trends hold. 

Emory Healthcare administrators and clinicians are using Cosmos across a range of public health applications, including: 

•   Vaccine effectiveness research at a scale and speed not previously possible through traditional study designs
•   Tracking COVID, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and influenza data to understand emerging and seasonal infectious threats in near real time
•    Examination of key diagnoses from newborn screening — including phenylketonuria, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy, X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, and hemoglobinopathies—to understand conditions, treatments, and outcomes over time

“Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to explore what Cosmos can offer public health, and I'm excited about where this work is headed,” says Stewart. "I have confidence in its level of de-identification and the Epic governance framework that guides how this data is used. Along with my public health colleagues, I prioritize data privacy and protection above all else. I’m particularly interested in Cosmos because of its grounding in electronic health record data. It sits at the intersection of clinical and public health informatics, and that's where I think some of the most important discoveries are still to be made."