U.S. Needs National Disease Surveillance System

The United States needs a national system of public-health surveillance to improve prevention and treatment of widespread chronic diseases, according to the Institute of Medicine. And that system should take advantage of all the information available in electronic medical records, insurance claims, patient-compiled data, and even death records.

"Expanding the use of EHRs in surveillance will have challenges, including the relatively low numbers of hospitals and practices now using the technology," the IOM said in a recently issued report. "Increasingly, this information is being comingled with other health data within large electronic data stores and used for population surveillance, performance assessment, predictive modeling, and care management. Although these sources have yet to be fully assessed, the potential is great that some, if not all, of them may complement and extend chronic disease surveillance eorts, although privacy issues must be addressed."

Emphasizing the value of a national system, the IOM report goes on...