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Data Sharing

One of the early successes for the National Syndromic Surveillance Program'™s (NSSP'™s) BioSense Platform was community agreement on what should make up national and regional picture of the data. For NSSP to meet program objectives, National level surveillance and situational awareness had to be made available – not just to CDC, but to the entire community. To make this possible, the community had to agree on a limited dataset that would be sufficient to produce national and regional picture. Currently when NSSP staff at CDC or a particular program review HHS Regional data, they can only see trends at high levels. Although, this information is proving useful, when very unusual data spikes occur there is insufficient information to determine its public health significance. CDC would like to set up HHS Regional Epi groups made up of syndromic surveillance practitioners within regions in order to communicate about potentially unusual findings and discuss implications for local jurisdictions.

Objective:

Within the BioSense Platform, users have the ability to view HHS Region level data that can provide insight into what may be happening around the country. Epidemiologists can examine this information for changes in trends of subsyndromes or other potential issues of public health concern and compare it to their local data. However, the insight that regional data can provide is limited without better understanding of what is happening in the jurisdictions that make up the region. This round table will discuss the benefits of engaging with other jurisdictions within regions and attempt to define rules of engagement that can be used to facilitate interactions.

Submitted by elamb on

A report jointly released by the de Beaumont Foundation and Johns Hopkins University, Using Electronic Health Data for Community Health: Example Cases and Legal Analysis provides public health departments with a framework that will allow them to request data from hospitals and health systems in order to move the needle on critical public health challenges.

Submitted by ctong on

All positive laboratory tests of reportable conditions on persons residing in New York State (NYS) are mandated to be sent to the NYS Department of Health (NYSDOH) via ECLRS. NYS, excluding New York City (NYC), receives over 100,000 ECLRS messages on general communicable diseases (CD) and hepatitis (HEP), not including Lyme disease and Influenza, annually. Although ECLRS is integrated with CDESS, the local health departments (LHD) need to review each lab report for proper initiation of a case investigation. Once the investigation is created, the LHD may need supportive evidence to create a reportable case or may dismiss it if evidence does not support the case definition.

Our goal is to follow all ECLRS records from official retrieval by the LHD through CDESS case creation, to ensure all cases are reported and are done so in a timely manner. Cases for diseases that are nationally notifiable are sent to CDC the following week for publication in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Timely reporting to CDC allows for more accurate description of disease occurrence, which is essential for public health planning and response.

Objective

Ensure all reportable communicable disease data coming through the Electronic Clinical Laboratory Reporting System (ECLRS) is reported to the Communicable Disease Electronic Surveillance System (CDESS) in a timely and complete manner.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Recent efforts to share syndromic surveillance data have focused on developing national systems, namely BioSense 2.01 . The problems with creating and implementing national systems, such as legal issues, difficulties in standardizing syndrome definitions, data quality, and different objectives, are well documented. In contrast, several local health departments have successfully shared data and analyses with each other, primarily during emergency events. The benefits of locally-driven data sharing include: (1) faster dissemination of data and analyses that have been created by those who understand the nuances of their own data, (2) easier process of standardizing syndrome definitions, (3) quickly designing appropriate analyses for the event, (4) smaller group of partners for consensus-building, and (5) ultimately improved timeliness in detection of public health events. The strategies used to share data and analyses between local and state health departments during planned and unplanned events may be informative to national systems.

Objective

To outline successful strategies for regional data-sharing and discuss how these strategies can be applied to other regions.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 2 public health reporting for Eligible Professionals (EPs) included a menu option for ambulatory syndromic surveillance. Review of currently existing models lead to a collaboration between the Illinois Health Information Exchange (ILHIE) and IDPH to build services that would support the use of the MPI, a database that can uniquely match records across systems. The MPI providers a mechanism for public health to manage multiple data streams, while maintaining confidentiality of health information and supporting the mission of public health to identify patterns of illness, apply effective interventions and conduct program evaluation. This initiative will allow IDPH to extend the use of the MPI to other surveillance domains, including hospital discharge, communicable disease, cancer and extensively drug resistance organism reporting.

Objective

This presentation will describe public health efforts to improve data collection by utilizing technology that supports record linkage through the implementation of the Master Patient Index (MPI). The initial use case will be applied to ambulatory syndromic surveillance at Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). It will include applications for incorporating the MPI into currently existing public health surveillance data and benefits to data integration and bidirectional information exchange.

Submitted by teresa.hamby@d… on

Problem Summary

A truncated historical dataset is provided from one or more subregions with multiple participating hospitals with enough variety in the patient volume and demographics to make the problem challenging and to generate alerting solutions useful to other regions.

Submitted by ctong on

Public health can harness the power of increasingly available health population data to improve practice and effectively allocate resources to areas of need. The driving forces of Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) and Meaningful Use are changing how public health and the healthcare industry communicate with one another. Through open source interfaces, the ability and power to move this population data from the healthcare world to public health entities is obtainable and sustainable.

Although national surveillance systems are maintained for human health (CDC) and for livestock disease (USDA); there is no network or data repository in the area of wildlife disease surveillance. Because emerging and re-emerging diseases severely affect wildlife populations, impact domestic and agricultural animals, and are a reservoir for zoonotic transmission, it is crucial to have early notification and recognition of disease patterns in wildlife populations. Due to fragmented systems of wildlife management, inconsistent investigation into sudden mortality events, and limited laboratory availability, there is not a single entity that is responsible for reporting disease events in North American wildlife populations.

Objective

The USGS National Wildlife Health Center in conjunction with federal, state, tribal partners proposed an event reporting system with current and historic information on wildlife morbidity and mortality events in North America. The vehicle to accomplish this goal is WHISPers, the Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership event reporting system. This system depicts laboratory confirmed wildlife mortality events using geospatial mapping capability. Data are collected by multiple partners to collectively enhance the understanding of disease in wildlife populations.

Submitted by Magou on

Health information increasingly needs to flow beyond the jurisdiction in which it was originally collected. As both people and microbes move across jurisdictional boundaries with increasing speed and ease, so too must health information. With an increased focus on privacy and security regulations comes an increased level of caution and formality related to data exchange between organizations, thus increasing the use of data exchange/data use agreements to establish clear parameters for exchange.

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