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Rosenbaum discusses the implications of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The legislation will take years to implement, and its full meaning can only be conceptualized at this point. But January 2014 will arrive in the blink of an eye. In sum, the Affordable Care Act is transformational, and enormous implementation challenges lie ahead. But the opportunities for major advances in public health policy and practice are simply unparalleled. The Act represents a singular opportunity not only to transform coverage and care, but also to rethink the basic mission of public health in a nation with universal coverage.

Law lies at the centre of successful national strategies for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. By law we mean international agreements, national and subnational legislation, regulations and other executive instruments, and decisions of courts and tribunals. However, the vital role of law in global health development is often poorly understood, and eclipsed by other disciplines such as medicine, public health and economics. This paper identifies key areas of intersection between law and noncommunicable diseases, beginning with the role of law as a tool for implementing policies for prevention and control of leading risk factors. We identify actions that the World Health Organization and its partners could take to mobilize the legal workforce, strengthen legal capacity and support effective use of law at the national level. Legal and regulatory actions must move to the centre of national noncommunicable disease action plans. This requires high-level leadership from global and national leaders, enacting evidence-based legislation and building legal capacities.

This Viewpoint reviews the debate about whether the professionalization of public health practice should be approached through a certification and licensure system. It introduces the recent attempt at professionalizing public health in Taiwan with the newly enacted Public Health Specialists Act of 2020, regulating the Public Health Specialist (PHS) through a state-mandated certificate. The Viewpoint discusses the implications of this new PHS Act on Taiwan’s public health education and professionalization. The PHS model in Taiwan is one of the first of its kind around the globe. Advocates of public health professionalization and public health educators could benefit from Taiwan’s experience.

An HIV outbreak in rural Indiana provides a cautionary tale. An aggressive, multipronged strategy is needed to prevent similar outbreaks, and it requires permanently lifting the ban on using federal funds to support needle-exchange programs. Many observers were surprised when Indiana Governor Mike Pence issued an executive order on March 26, 2015, declaring a public health emergency after a rapidly escalating outbreak of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified in Scott County, a rural region on the Kentucky border. 1 Others, however, had seen it coming. Over the years, a growing number of young people in Scott County — like those in surrounding counties and states — had begun abusing opiates such as oxymorphone, an opioid analgesic prescribed by local medical providers, until a more tamper-resistant formulation and policy reform began limiting its abuse. Facing the . . .

A robust health infrastructure in every country is the most effective long-term preparedness strategy for global health emergencies. This includes not only health systems and their human resources, but also countries' legal infrastructure for health: the laws and policies that empower, obligate and sometimes limit government and private action. The law is also an important tool in health promotion and protection. Public health professionals play important roles in health law - from the development of policies, through their enforcement, to the scientific evaluation of the health impact of laws. Member States are already mandated to communicate their national health laws and regulations to the World Health Organization (WHO). In this paper we propose that WHO has the authority and credibility to support capacity-building in the area of health law within Member States, and to make national laws easier to access, understand, monitor and evaluate. We believe a strong case can be made to donors for the funding of a public health law centre or unit, that has adequate staffing, is robustly networked with its regional counterparts and is integrated into the main work of WHO. The mission of the unit or centre would be to define and integrate scientific and legal expertise in public health law, both technical and programmatic, across the work of WHO, and to conduct and facilitate global health policy surveillance.

This commentary argues that 100 years after the deadly Spanish flu, the public health emergency community’s responses to much more limited pandemics and outbreaks demonstrate a critical shortage of personnel and resources. Rather than relying on nonpharmaceutical interventions, such as quarantine, the United States must reorder its health priorities to ensure adequate preparation for a large-scale pandemic.

Have lessons really been learnt?

Surveillance is the act of systematically collecting, collating, and analyzing health-related information that can be communicated on a timely basis to guide action.1 Sentinel surveillance is one form of surveillance that can serve as an early warning system in efforts to identify health threats that require rapid action.2 Sentinel surveillance systems, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's US Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network,3 provide the early red flag, the proverbial canary in the mine, that alerts public health to a threat requiring action. A diverse group of local and state-level public health officials were invited by AJPH Associate Editor Paul Erwin to participate in the sentinel surveillance system. Aspects of geography, population demographics and density, public health agency organizational structure and reach, and recent political context were the primary characteristics explored in considering whom to invite to participate. President Trump has promised to make fundamental policy changes that are vitally important to the public's health, from repealing the Affordable Care Act, to environmental deregulation, to issues pertaining to women's health. What we will report on through this sentinel practitioner surveillance system is what a handful of committed public health professionals are experiencing first-hand-good or bad-as an early indication that the fact ofchange, not the fear of change, needs further light. The author wishes to acknowledge the commitment, dedication, and input ofthe public health practitioners who are participating in this surveillance network, and to AJPHEditor-in-ChiefAlfredo Morabia and Associate Editor Mark Rothstein for their helpful suggestions and guidance on...

The accelerating adoption of electronic health record (EHR) systems will have profound impacts on clinical care. It will also have far-reaching implications for public health research and surveillance, which in turn could lead to changes in public policy, statutes, and regulations. The public health benefits of EHR use can be significant. However, researchers and analysts who rely on EHR data must proceed with caution and understand the potential limitations of EHRs.Much has been written about the risk of EHR privacy breaches. This paper focuses on a different set of concerns, those relating to data quality. Unlike clinical trial data, EHR data is not recorded primarily to meet the needs of researchers. Because of clinicians’ workloads, poor user-interface design, and other factors, EHR data is surprisingly likely to be erroneous, miscoded, fragmented, and incomplete. Although EHRs eliminate the problem of cryptic handwriting, other kinds of errors are more common with EHRs than with paper records.

Objectives. Although a growing body of evidence demonstrates that availability and quality of essential public health services vary widely across communities, relatively little is known about the factors that give rise to these variations. We examined the association of institutional, financial, and community characteristics of local public health delivery systems and the performance of essential services. Methods. Performance measures were collected from local public health systems in 7 states and combined with secondary data sources. Multivariate, linear, and nonlinear regression models were used to estimate associations between system characteristics and the performance of essential services. Results. Performance varied significantly with the size, financial resources, and organizational structure of local public health systems, with some public health services appearing more sensitive to these characteristics than others. Staffing levels and community characteristics also appeared to be related to the performance of selected services. Conclusions. Reconfiguring the organization and financing of public health systems in some communities—such as through consolidation and enhanced intergovernmental coordination—may hold promise for improving the performance of essential services.