PUBH3214: Information and Data Sources for Public Health Decision Making

Public health professionals develop clinical and policy recommendations using data, including data that has been collected expressly for public health use such as with surveillance, or in other circumstances, available datasets gathered for other purposes (like military service, voting records, or school enrollment). This course will familiarize students with commonly used sources of data for public health practitioners, along with their strengths and limitations in making conclusions from those data sources. Students will then explore how to use currently available data to improve public health recommendations, which will entail an exploration of the concepts related to human disease through a basic understanding of physiology, biology, microbiology, and toxicology. This data analysis can culminate in making informed recommendations to other public health practitioners, communities, clinicians, and policy makers to solve or reduce the harms of the threats to public health. At the completion of this course, students will be able to identify, describe and discuss improvements to public health data sources expected of an entry-level public health practitioner. There are three parts to this course: 1) Introduction to public health surveillance and other sources of public health data, such as records from sources that are not generally used for health purposes (e.g., administrative datasets such as from occupation registries or motor vehicle registrations); 2) Detailed description of the creation, implementation, and analysis of public health surveillance data; and 3) Discussion of professional issues related to these data sources, such as a formal ethics evaluation of the loss of individual privacy versus the potential benefits to the public’s health when using administrative datasets or mandatory government surveillance. Because of the amount of surveillance-related material in this course – in addition to the other times surveillance is covered in the public health major – a graduate of this program would be well positioned to get a job in governmental public health collecting surveillance data. This course expands on the foundation courses that focus on determinants of health and health equalities. Several topics in this course are discussed in further detail, such as how determinants of health are surveilled in diverse communities, and how non-health datasets such as graduation rates help explain health inequalities. In addition, this course comes before the foundation course on public health and healthcare delivery. We will introduce topics that will prepare you for that course, such as the potential selection bias in populations of people who receive medical care in clinics, hospitals, and long-term care facilities; limitations of medical records for research; and the role of records from government-assisted health plans.

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