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Improving syndromic surveillance for non-power users: NC DETECT dashboards

Description

NC DETECT provides near-real-time statewide surveillance capacity to local, regional and state level users across NC with twice daily data feeds from 117 (99%) emergency departments (EDs), hourly updates from the statewide poison center, and daily feeds from statewide EMS runs and select urgent care centers. The NC DETECT Web Application provides access to aggregate and line listing analyses customized to users' respective jurisdictions. The most active users are state-level epidemiologists (DPH) and hospital-based public health epidemiologists (PHEs). The use of NC DETECT is included in PHE job descriptions and NC DETECT functionality has been developed specifically to meet the surveillance needs of this group, including data entry of aggregated lab results for flu and respiratory panels. Interviews of local health department (LHD) users completed as part of an evaluation project have suggested that functionality specifically tailored to LHDs may increase their use of the NC DETECT Web application [1]. As of June 2011, there were 139 LHD users with active accounts to use the Web application (out of 384 total users with active accounts).

Objective

To describe the development, implementation and preliminary evaluation of new dashboard interfaces in NC DETECT, designed primarily for infrequent users of NC DETECT at local health departments.

Submitted by elamb on