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Data Sharing

Description

Reporting of binational cases has been enacted in Arizona systematically since 2007. Investigating binational cases and providing binational counterparts with timely information can help to enact interventions, as well as strengthens communication between binational, federal, and local health partners. This has allowed a better understanding of the burden of disease among binational/border populations. The process of systematically sharing these cases has allowed for appropriate and timely public health interventions to be implemented, crossing an international boundary in both states.

Objective

This will provide an overview of the process by which Arizona and Sonora identify and share binational cases of public health importance.

Submitted by knowledge_repo… on
Description

When the Chicago Bears met the Indianapolis Colts for Super Bowl XLI in Miami in January, 2007, fans from multiple regions visited South Florida for the game. In the past, public health departments have instituted heightened local surveillance during mass gatherings due to concerns about increased risk of disease outbreaks. For the first time, in 2007, health departments in all three Super Bowl-related regions already practiced daily disease surveillance using biosurveillance information systems (separate installations of the ESSENCE system, developed at JHUAPL). The situation provided an opportunity to explore ways in which separate surveillance systems could be coordinated for effective, short-term, multijurisdictional surveillance.

 

Objective

This paper describes an inter-jurisdictional surveillance data sharing effort carried out by public health departments in Miami, Chicago, and Indianapolis in conjunction with Super Bowl XLI.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The Internet has created an information revolution that spans across all knowledge domains and removes temporal and geographic barriers. Various disparate tools allow individuals to communicate with each other across these barriers. We also have an abundance of electronic resources containing health information locked inside free text components. The lack of integration of these tools and electronic resources has prevented harnessing of information for use in integrated and novel ways. We developed an application for 'Semantic Processing and Integration of Distributed Electronic Resources for Epidemiology' or EpiSPIDER (http://www.epispider.org), an integrative web-based information processing system that uses these tools and electronic resources to create an information environment for enhancing the surveillance of emerging infectious disease threats to global health.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The Georgia Power Corporation (GPC) provides power to 155 (97.5%) of the 159 counties in Georgia (GA), and employs 9,600 people throughout the state. GPC is engaged in preparing for pandemic influenza, and committed to protecting the critical infrastructure and ensuring its continuity of operations. The GPC employee “Crisis Absence Reporting Tool” (CART) was designed to provide the Georgia Syndromic

Surveillance (GA SS) Program with employee absentee/ reason to inform Public Health and GPC leadership about health events occurring in their employees statewide.

The GA SS Program has been implemented in 13 (72%) of the 18 Health Districts. In each of these locations, data are transferred from an ED, ambulatory care center, or school district to the Georgia Division of Public Health (GDPH) for analysis and dissemination of results to all stakeholders. GDPH wanted to collaborate with a large corporation with a statewide employee base to conduct absentee and reason for absence SS to provide an additional perspective to the existing data streams used by GA SS.

In GA, the LHD are responsible for organizing pandemic planning committees comprised of community partners to discuss continuity of basic services and maintenance of the critical infrastructure at the local level during an influenza pandemic. Increasing SS capacity is an important component of Local Health District (LHD) pandemic planning strategies in GA.

 

Objective

To create a non-traditional partnership between the GPC and the GDPH to aid in adverse health event detection and response activities during an influenza pandemic or other health emergency. This will include augmenting CART with SS data from the GA SS Program. These data will be analyzed by GA SS and results disseminated to LHDs, who monitor and respond to SS data in their jurisdictions. Analyses will also be provided to GPC to aid in resource allocation to ensure the continuity of services in GA during emergencies.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

For syndromic and related surveillance systems to be effective public health tools, state and local health departments and CDC need access to a variety of types of health data.  However, since the development and implementation of syndromic surveillance systems began in recent years, experience in gaining access to personal health data has been mixed.  Although some have argued that the HIPAA Privacy Rule permits data owners to disclose protected health information to public health authorities, covered entities have cited HIPAA in refusing to provide data to researchers and health departments.  In addition to HIPAA, a variety of federal, state, and local public health laws enable, restrict, and otherwise influence the ability to share data for public health surveillance purposes.  Concerns about protecting proprietary data also influence data sharing for public health purposes.  It is in the national interest to clarify the conditions under which data can be shared, balancing privacy and confidentiality with the ability of public health agencies at all levels of jurisdiction to access information needed to protect the public from disease.  As the practice of syndromic surveillance evolves, it is equally important to assure that data are collected and used ethically as well as legally. The methods and uses of syndromic surveillance pose challenging questions regarding the interpretation and future development of ethical and legal standards for public health practice and research. The discussion will not be confined to the legal and ethical issues surrounding the release of data but will also address these issues as they concern the subsequent transmission, storage, replication, and display of health data by local, state, and federal public health users, including how the information is used for both early event detection and situational awareness functions. 

Objective

The International Society for Disease Surveillance will convene a group of experts to: (1) share experience with privacy, confidentiality, and other legal and ethical issues in syndromic surveillance; (2) clarify the research, practice, legal, and ethical issues that enable and restrict data sharing; and (3) identify approaches to overcoming barriers in a way that protects privacy and confidentiality while maximizing the usefulness of syndromic and related surveillance systems.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Versatile, user-friendly visualization tools are required to organize the wealth of information available to users of large, regional surveillance systems into a coherent view of population health status. Communications components must allow multiple users of the same system to share information about the health of their populations in an organized fashion and facilitate communications among jurisdictions.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has developed a communications tool to be used within the regional disease surveillance system in the National Capital Region. This abstract describes this new communications component that is designed to encourage and facilitate communication between multiple jurisdictions using a common surveillance system.

 

Objective

The objective is to create a capability within an existing regional disease surveillance system that allows event information to be shared easily, thoroughly, and in a timely manner, while gathering the knowledge needed to improve the entire system in the future. The functionality of this communication component must balance the utility of immediate situational awareness with the long term benefits of capturing critical information, such as system usage patterns and user response behavior, which can be used to develop future system enhancements. 

Submitted by elamb on
Description

In the fall of 2006, the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) and the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) proactively began general discussions regarding surveillance issues of mutual interest. Both states, having operational syndromic surveillance systems, thought value could be added to one another’s program by sharing data across their common border. Ohio receives emergency department chief complaint data from 130 of its hospitals; Indiana from 76 hospitals. The ODH uses the EpiCenter System managed by Health Monitoring Systems, while the ISDH Public Health Emergency Service System uses Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Communitybased Epidemics. Each state desired to view the new shared data through its own system. A formal memorandum of understanding was developed and signed by both states to support syndromic data sharing. Data began flowing between the two states in April, 2008.

 

Objective

The ODH and the ISDH enhanced their individual syndromic surveillance efforts through cross-border sharing of emergency department chief complaint data.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The Public Health Information Network (PHIN) Messaging Service (PHINMS) is a PHIN-certified messaging system, initiated and supported by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. PHINMS is widely used by many hospitals in the state(s) to send their Electronic Lab Reports. The PHINMS architecture allows for multiple data streams and routing configurations. However, many states are still using the legacy File Transport Protocol for their syndromic data transfer. There are many benefits in utilizing PHINMS that will be outlined in this presentation. PHINMS contains two components: sender and receiver. A PHINMS entity (either a hospital or DOH) can act as both/either a sender and/or a receiver. This makes two-way communication possible via the same PHINMS connection.

 

OBJECTIVE

This presentation describes the secure and reliable data transfer methodology of syndromic data between hospitals and public health agencies using the PHINMS. Included is an overview of PHINMS and several programs South Carolina has developed including Auto Send, Data Extract, Email Notification, and Self-Issued Security Certificates. These programs are configurable for different hospitals and run automatically. The system can be easily adopted and customized by other states.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

Integration of information from multiple disparate and heterogeneous sources is a labor and resource intensive task. Heterogeneity can come about in the way data is represented or in the meaning of data in different contexts. Semantic Web technologies have been proposed to address both representational and semantic heterogeneity in distributed and collaborative environments. We introduce an automated semantic information integration platform for public health surveillance using RDF and the Simple Knowledge Organization Standard developed by the Semantic Web community.

 

OBJECTIVE

This paper proposes the use of Semantic Web technologies to integrate heterogeneous data generated by disparate systems for public health use.

Submitted by elamb on
Description

The ability to provide real time syndromic surveillance throughout the Capital Health Region is currently undeveloped. There are limited mechanisms for routine real time surveillance of disease or conditions of public health interest, e.g. communicable diseases, toxic exposure or injury. Toxic exposure and injury while preventable are not notifiable in Alberta and as a consequence there is no real-time surveillance system to identify burden of disease or opportunities for intervention. The notifiable disease system is reliant on paper-based forms which are slow, prone to human error, and labor intensive to convert to electronic database format for flexible analysis and interpretation. Finally there is no system to link the data collected on the same individual in each database without compromising confidentiality. ARTSSN is designed to remedy these deficiencies.

 

Objective

In this presentation we describe the creation of an IT architecture and infrastructure to integrate data from four sources to support real-time syndromic surveillance for injuries, toxic exposures and notifiable diseases in Capital Health, Alberta, Canada.

Submitted by elamb on