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The goal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Environmental Public Health Tracking (EPHT) Program is to build a nationwide network of integrated health and environmental data to measure impact of environmental factors on public health. This article describes how hospital discharge data can provide essential information for public health programs, including EPHT. The state inpatient hospital discharge data systems have properties that are highly desirable for surveillance and multistate initiatives, like EPHT, yet accessing and using the data can create challenges for the end user. This article highlights the strengths and limitations of hospital discharge data and references crash outcome data and evaluation system and Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project as models for accessing, linking, and aggregating hospital discharge data. These federal-state data partnerships have overcome many of these challenges and have the potential to serve as models for the EPHT Program. The lessons learned from these 'early adopters' can shortcut the implementation period for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention EPHT Program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the factors that led to the success of Medicaid and State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) agencies in using administrative data to oversee their programs in the U.S. The strategies for building capacity for using management tools and improving the quality of their data are also discussed.

This article describes the process for developing consensus guidelines and tools for releasing public health data via the Web and highlights approaches leading agencies have taken to balance disclosure risk with public dissemination of reliable health statistics. An agency's choice of statistical methods for improving the reliability of released data for Web-based query systems is based upon a number of factors, including query system design (dynamic analysis vs preaggregated data and tables), population size, cell size, data use, and how data will be supplied to users. The article also describes those efforts that are necessary to reduce the risk of disclosure of an individual's protected health information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]