Even with legal and regulatory restrictions on the release and use of data sets for public health surveillance, mechanisms have been created to facilitate surveillance and other programs’ ability to share data or to use other programs’ data. Legal surveillance undertakings support public health maintenance at numerous stages, starting with the establishment of health objectives. Understanding the legal part of public health surveillance means avoiding individuals or entities from fines and criminal charges against healthcare data misuse. It also provides lawful information about the leading causes of sickness, injury, and disability, also known as morbidity, and death data. It can also be described as “mortality within the population served by the public health agencies.” Surveillance systems and their applications differ extensively in both structure and function. Consequently, the optimal system design is contingent on an organization’s specific information needs and resources. In developing and maintaining surveillance systems, public health administrators must use current epidemiologic awareness in tandem with operative managerial approaches.
In the United States, data systems are created by the ongoing, systematic collection of health, demographic, and other information through federally funded national surveys; vital statistics, public and private administrative and claims data; regulatory data, and medical records data. Although health surveillance was initially focused on infectious diseases, surveillance systems now monitor the incidence of a broad range of health events. Some of these events include infectious and chronic diseases, injury, disability, occupational health events, environmental exposures, personal behaviors, and the use of health services.
