Utah has a centralized State Health Department and 12 Local Health Departments situated throughout the state. Coordination of outbreaks or events that crosses jurisdictions has been historically difficult. Utah has not had a functional NEDSS-compliant database until 2009 and still does not have an Outbreak Management System (OMS). A survey was sent to Local Health Departments to assess their perception of need for real-time knowledge of current outbreak/events, with the majority indicating that current processes were inadequate.
Objective
The aim of this project was to create a secured web-based application that would run within the PH Access communication framework at the Utah Department of Health. This applicationFEpi Issue TrackerFwould provide State and Local Health Departments with an environment that can be used to monitor actions during an event. We created a tracking system that functions as a combination dashboard/ notification system to permit timely and effective communication of epidemiology events. This tracking system, Epi Issue Tracker, is used by all 12 Local Health Departments and the State Department of Health to share information across the state. There have been 830 issues/outbreaks entered into Epi Issue Tracker since January 2009, with 647 updates posted for those issues/outbreaks.