Research on public health emergency response system platform

The present public health system has continually struggled to combat ongoing and emerging public health threats and emergencies. The main impediment to improving public health readiness is the lack of an effective Public Health Emergency Response System. Although many health systems have been built and large amount of data collected, it is hard to analyze these data in depth and use them efficiently. An effective PHEMS should be able to manage data, produce information and provide services. Based on digital city, such a PHEMS has a most possible chance to be built. Detailed analysis of the architecture of the PHEMS, including (1) the surveillance system for data collection, (2) the consolidated information model based on HL7 Reference Information Model (RIM), (3) and the public health service framework, is focused in this paper. As a test-bed, the implementation of a prototype, which is a part of Digital Beijing Pilot, is illustrated. In the end, some operational and technical difficulties are discussed.