The NNDSS is the public health surveillance system that enables all levels of public health (local, state, territorial, and federal) to monitor the occurrence and spread of the diseases and conditions that the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) has officially designated as being "nationally notifiable". The NNDSS data are a critical source of data for monitoring disease trends, effectiveness of prevention and control programs, and policy development. To provide timely NNDSS data, state and territorial health departments voluntarily report notifiable disease incidence data to CDC when they become aware of these cases and as per recommended national notification timeframes. These provisional data are published each week in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). Great strides have been made exploring and exploiting new and different sources of disease surveillance data and developing robust statistical methods for analyzing the collected data (1). However, there have been fewer efforts in the area of on-line dissemination of surveillance data, which is so important in maximizing the utility of collected data.
Objective
The purpose of this project was to identify ideas and potential options for an enhanced dissemination of provisional data for the US National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS).