Pooling Heterogeneous Data for Public Health: A Brief Look at Data Standardization. Notes from a meeting with Data Standards Meeting

Abstract

Public health researchers are not well-trained regarding the various types or function of data standards. Often, a choice of a data standard for a study is based on the few that one knows of. However, an awareness of tradeoffs is often lacking. We held a meeting with a group of leaders from data standards organization to discuss the past and current efforts to make data standards more friendly to observational data studies as well as their efforts on interoperability. The following is a summary of the presentations given by the data standards. We hope that this assist researchers in making educated decisions when selecting a standard in the future