The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) initiated a broad range of national implementation activities. In order to support the critical activities of meaningful use (MU), ONC established the S&I Framework. In the beginning of 2011, the Laboratory Reporting Interface (LRI) Public Health (PH) Work Group (WG) was formed as a subworking group of the S&I Framework LRI activity. This LRI PH WG, besides providing PH required data elements to the LRI, assessed a need for documentation of the broad landscape of public health data exchange transactions. As a result, this WG recommended to participants and leadership of the ONC S&I that a new initiative, the ONC S&I PH-R activity should be established. In July 2011, a team of PH practitioners (co-authors of this presentation) started working on a charter and proposed deliverables for the group.