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Johnson Geraldine

Description

Hospital discharge data received by public health agencies has a reporting lag time of greater than six months. This data is often used retrospectively to conduct surveillance to assess severity of illness and outcome, and for evaluating performance of public health surveillance systems. 

With the emergence of Health Information Exchanges and Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIOs), inpatient data can be available to public health in near real-time. However, there currently are no established public health practices or information systems for conducting routine surveillance in the inpatient setting. 

Through a contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York State Department of Health

initiated the development of a statewide public–health Health Information Exchanges with New York RHIOs. Daily

minimum biosurveillance data set data-exchange implementation, and evaluation efforts were focused on one RHIO (RHIO A) and one participating hospital system composed of five acute-care facilities.

 

Objective

The objective of this paper is to assess the potential utility of inpatient minimum biosurveillance data set data obtained from RHIOs for pneumonia and influenza surveillance.

Submitted by hparton on
Description

There is national recognition of the need for cross-programmatic data and system coordination and integration for surveillance, prevention, response, and control implementation. To accomplish this public health must develop an informatics competency and create an achievable roadmap, supported by performance measures, for the future. Within the New York State Department of Health, Office of Public Health (OPH), a cross-organizational and cross-functional Public Health Information Management Workgroup (PHIM-WG) was formed to align public health information and technology goals, objectives, strategies, and resources across OPH. In June 2011, the OPH Performance Management Initiative, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offered strategic planning workshops to PHIM-WG.

 

Objective 

To develop strategic objectives necessary to optimize the collection, integration, and use of information across public health programs and internal and external partners for improving the overall health and safety of people and their communities.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The New York State (NYS) Medicaid Program provides healthcare for 34% of the population in New York City (NYC) and 4%-20% in each of the 57 county populations up-state. Prescription data are collected through the sub-mission of claims forms to the Medicaid Program and transmitted daily to the NYS Syndromic Surveillance Program as summary counts by drug category and patient’s ZIP Code, age category, and sex. One of the 18 drug categories is influenza agents, which in-cludes rimantadine, oseltamivir, and zanamivir.

For surveillance of influenza-like illness (ILI) activity, the NYS and NYC Sentinel Physician Influenza Surveillance Program collects from sentinel physicians weekly reports of the total number of patients seen and the number of patients presenting with ILI (defined as temperature > 100 degrees F, presence of cough or sore throat, and absence of other known cause of these symptoms). Not all counties in NYS have sentinel physicians: in the 2003-2004 flu surveillance season (Week 40, in early October, 2003, to Week 20, in late May, 2004), 37 of 57 upstate counties and all 5 counties of NYC had sentinel physicians.

 

Objective

To evaluate the usefulness of daily counts of prescriptions for influenza agents charged to Medicaid insurance, by county of residence of the recipient, for detection of elevated ILI in NYS, currently monitored through physicians participating in the CDC Influenza Surveillance Program.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

MUse will make EHR data increasingly available for public health surveillance. For Stage 2, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulations will require hospitals and offer an option for eligible professionals to provide electronic syndromic surveillance data to public health. Together, these data can strengthen public health surveillance capabilities and population health outcomes (Figure 1). To facilitate the adoption and effective use of these data to advance population health, public health priorities and system capabilities must shape standards for data exchange. Input from all stakeholders is critical to ensure the feasibility, practicality, and, hence, adoption of any recommendations and data use guidelines.

Objective

To develop national Stage 2 Meaningful Use (MUse) recommendations for syndromic surveillance using hospital inpatient and ambulatory clinical care electronic health record (EHR) data

Submitted by uysz on

Advances in health information technology are providing exciting opportunities to expand public health surveillance capabilities with the addition of more timely electronic health data. Additionally, the implementation of the Meaningful Use provisions of the HITECH Act presents public health agencies (PHAs) with a chance to develop systems that enhance public health monitoring, prevention, and response activities through the use of novel data sources.