Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Environmental informatics plays an important role in the human-
population-based studies described above. Although environmental informatics
received much of its momentum from central Europe in the early 1990s (Pill-
mann et al. 2006), EPA has recognized its importance and has played a role in
shaping its direction. The agency helped to establish the Environmental Data
Standards Council, which was subsumed in 2005 by the Exchange Network
Leadership Council (Environmental Information Exchange Network 2011), an
environmental-data exchange partnership representing states, tribes, territories,
and EPA. The council's mission includes supporting environmental information-
sharing among its partners through automation, standardization, and real-time
access. The scope of data exchange covers air, water, health, waste, and natural
resources, and covers multiple programs. Cross-program data include data from
the Department of Homeland Security, the Toxics Release Inventory, pollution-
prevention programs, the Substance Registry Services System, and data obtained
with geospatial technologies. The council is an example of useful and productive
national efforts to generate environmental informatics data. On the basis of
technologic advances and new environmental challenges discussed throughout
this report, it will be necessary for EPA to begin to make data standards flexible
and adaptable so that it can use data that are less structured and less groomed.
Health informatics has a strong history in the United States. There are nu-
merous national and state data registries on chronic and nonchronic diseases,
such as the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results cancer registry and the
National Birth Defects registry. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Qual-
ity of the Department of Health and Human Services maintains a national hospi-
tal discharge database and, as previously mentioned, CDC's National Center for
Health Statistics conducts the NHANES annually to study health behaviors, die-
tary intake, environmental exposure, and disease status of the US population.
EPA could also work with CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and the
National Center for Environmental Health to facilitate the merging of environ-
mental-monitoring data (on air, water, and ecosystems) with national databases
that have biomarker and health data, such as NHANES. Such merging, follow-
ing the NHANES model of public access, could constitute a major advance in
the understanding of environmental exposures and their health effects and in
informing policy regulation and the prevention and control of environmental
exposures. Collaborating with other epidemiologic research efforts, EPA will
have the opportunity to identify the optimal population-based prospective cohort
study protocol to answer environmental-health questions, to ensure that high-
quality data on environmental exposures are incorporated into large epidemi-
ologic studies, and to contribute to the analysis and interpretation of exposure
and health-effect associations. In addition, there are proprietary databases owned
by healthcare providers and insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid. These
databases lay out the foundation of health informatics in the United States and
have been successfully used in environmental health research.
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