Syndromic surveillance is commonly supported by information generated from electronic health record (EHR) systems and sent to public health via standardized messaging. Before public health can receive syndromic surveillance information from an EHR, a healthcare provider must demonstrate reliable and timely generation of messages according to national standards. This process is known as onboarding. Onboarding at the Tennessee Department of Health (TDH) focused heavily on human review of HL7 messages. However, the visual inspection of messages was time-intensive and delayed efforts to provide constructive feedback to participating healthcare providers. To ease the quantity of manual review done during the onboarding process, TDH created an application to assist in the process of reviewing syndromic surveillance messages.
Objective:
To show how the creation of a software tool and implementation of new processes improved the efficiency of syndromic surveillance onboarding at the Tennessee Department of Health.