Welcome Letter

This is an exciting time for the health IT and e-health fields! Few areas of technology are evolving as rapidly, and over the coming decade, few domains are expected to have a greater impact on public health and health care practice.

In response, we have established the Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health Information Technology or "CPHIT" (pronounced "see-fit".) Scientists from across the Johns Hopkins University will coalesce through our new Center. We also are actively engaging health and technology stakeholders from around the nation and globe. Our ultimate goal is to improve the health of populations by advancing the state-of-the-art of health information technology (HIT) and e-health.

CPHIT will draw on Johns Hopkins faculty and scientists from numerous disciplines at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, the Whiting School of Engineering, the Carey Business School and the Applied Physics Laboratory. It is our intent to create new knowledge and to develop and enhance tools that will allow public health and health care organizations to apply health IT to wellness and health improvement programs targeted at communities, consumer groups and special needs patient populations.

Both in terms of vision and breadth of available scientific assets, there is no other health informatics R&D Center quite like CPHIT. During our inaugural year, we've experienced a high level of interest from many parties. We are pleased by the response, as it is our objective to maximize substantive interactions with external business, technology, medical, and government organizations.

To that end, we have launched a comprehensive Industry Partners program patterned after leading academic engineering R&D centers. Through this outreach program, and in other ways, we are actively seeking collaboration and support. We are also looking for "wired" integrated delivery systems, public health agencies and managed care organizations who share our vision for the future. We are seeking their help in creating new knowledge and evidence by allowing us to collaborate with them to analyze their Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other population-focused digital databases. So, if you are interested in this and more, we welcome your inquiries.

Given that we are part of a university that is world-renowned for its educational mission, we are also very involved in informatics education: most of it is available on a distance-learning basis and, in some instances, there is no tuition cost to the student. Please refer to the education section on our website. Get back to us if you have further questions about our informatics certification, degree or continuing-education programs.

It is our vision for the Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT to become a recognized, independent source of evidence, methods and scientific information related to population health-focused HIT, e-health and public health informatics. Please check back with us frequently for CPHIT's future publications, programs and other offerings. We hope that our website will grow into an important portal supporting the new and rapidly evolving field of population health informatics and HIT. We look forward to hearing from you and to exploring how we might collaborate.

Thank you for your interest!

Prof. Jonathan P. Weiner
Founding Director
The Johns Hopkins Center for Population Health IT
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Baltimore, Maryland, USA