A vision for child health information systems: developing child health information systems to meet medical care and public health needs.

In both the medical care and public health arenas, a variety of information systems have been developed to serve providers and program managers. In general, these systems have not been designed to share information with other information systems and provide comprehensive information about a child's health status to the information user. A number of initiatives are underway to develop integrated information systems. In December 2003, All Kids Count hosted an invitational conference "Developing Child Health Information Systems to Meet Medical Care and Public Health Needs." Through a series of plenary presentations and breakout discussion groups, participants developed a series of recommendations about governance, economic issues, information infrastructure, and uses of information from integrated child health information systems (CHIS). Common threads in the recommendations were: (1) development of a national coalition of stakeholders to promote integration of separate child health information systems within the context of ongoing national initiatives such as the National Health Information Infrastructure and the Public Health Information Network, (2) the need to develop the business and policy cases for integrated CHIS, (3) the need to develop agreement on standards for collecting and transferring information, and (4) the need to get the word out about the importance of integrating separate CHIS to improve health and health services.