Improving the public health information network through semantic modeling

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has created the Public Health Information Network (PHIN) to advance fully capable, interoperable information systems in public health organizations. PHIN prioritizes public health information systems' functional requirements, capabilities, performance measures, and operational characteristics while letting those systems choose enabling approaches, methods and concepts to meet the requirements. It also provides a certification for public health administrators to evaluate information infrastructure's quality. Although PHIN encompasses multiple domains and standards, it doesn't help organizations that adopt it to demonstrate alignment to interoperability mandates or federal and industrial standards (such as the Federal Enterprise Architecture). By merging the information distributed across different PHIN documentation artifacts, the user can see, access, and query all of it in one place.