Public health, data standards, and vocabulary: crucial infrastructure for reliable public health surveillance.

The present, rapid adoption of electronic records in clinical care is likely to shift public health surveillance from passive, human-mediated abstraction to active, computer-generated reports. However, the accuracy and efficiency of this process depends upon the adoption of consistent information standards from beside to population and the relevance of these data to public health. This article outlines the current status of data standards of relevance to public health and expands upon the ideal goal state in which health information would be collected once and then reused for multiple health-related purposes, including public health surveillance.