Public Health Informatics: priorities, challenges and opportunities

Public Health Informatics is a growing academic discipline increasingly contingent on the propagation, manipulation and synthesis of information from a variety of resources. PHI is the intersection of information technology and health care. It deals with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in public health. Public health practitioners now do much of their surveillance, support, reporting, data analysis, and data collection via the internet or on computer systems. This article reports and reviews on the issues involved in PHI specially focus on priorities, challenges, and opportunities with their practical applications.