Communicable disease surveillance is a core Public Health function. Many diseases must be reported to state and federal agencies (1). To manage and adjudicate such cases, public health stakeholders gather various data elements. Since cases are identified in various healthcare settings, not all information sought by public health is available (2) resulting in varied field completeness, which affects the measured and perceived data quality. To better understand this variation, we evaluated public health practitioners’ perceived value of these fields to initiate or complete communicable disease reports.
Objective:
To assess communicable disease report fields required by public health practitioners and evaluate the variation in the perceived utility of these fields.