Community of Practice

Introduction: response to this, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), CSTE, and the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPCC) members created the Poison Center Public Health Community of Practice (CoP). The CoP acts as a platform, to facilitate sharing experiences, identify best practices, and develop relationships among federal agencies, state and local health departments (HD), and PCs. Since its inception, the CoP garnered over 250 members, hosted more than 25 webinars regarding PC-HD collaborations, and produced five newsletters highlighting subjects pertinent to PC and HD personnel. To date, the CoP's primary focus has been to strengthen PC-HD partnerships; however, recent events highlight opportunities to expand the public health impact of the CoP. In this roundtable, we will discuss how the CoP was leveraged by federal and state health agencies to build new multidisciplinary and inter-agency relationships and how these experiences have led to the proposed guidance.

Objective: - To discuss the development of a set of tools for interagency collaborations on health surveillance - To determine the core contents of the tools based on known gaps in health surveillance - To determine collaborators in development and timelines for completion

Asymptomatic Bacteriuria (ASB) is defined as the presence of bacteria in the urine of a patient without signs or symptoms of a urinary tract infection (UTI). It is one of the most common reasons for inappropriate antibiotic use in hospitalized patients. Without efforts to check inappropriate use, our communities could see increased numbers of highly resistant bacterial pathogens contributing to the public health threat of antimicrobial resistance. Treatment itself may be associated with subsequent antimicrobial resistance, adverse drug effects, and cost. The Houston Health Department (HHD) has made it a priority to address antibiotic resistance and stewardship by working collaboratively with members of the healthcare community to address this patient safety issue. As such HHD, in conjunction with infectious diseases experts from the HHD Antimicrobial Stewardship Executive Committee formed a joint learning collaborative to work on an asymptomatic bacteriuria stewardship project. The goal of the project was to engage with healthcare professionals across facilities within the Houston area to work collaboratively to help reduce unnecessary testing and treatment of ASB.

Objective: 1) To describe findings from the joint collaborative between the Houston Health Department and Houston-based hospitals 2) To promote cross sectional partnerships and collaborations across health agencies.

On November 20, 2017, several sites participating in the NSSP reported anomalies in their syndromic data. Upon review, it was found that between November 17-18, an EHR vendor’s syndromic product experienced an outage and errors in processing data. The ISDS DQC, NSSP, a large EHR vendor, and many of the affected sites worked together to identify the core issues, evaluate ramifications, and formulate solutions to provide to the entire NSSP CoP.

Objective: The National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) Community of Practice (CoP) works to support syndromic surveillance by providing guidance and assistance to help resolve data issues and foster relationships between jurisdictions, stakeholders, and vendors. During this presentation, we will highlight the value of collaboration through the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS) Data Quality Committee (DQC) between jurisdictional sites conducting syndromic surveillance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) NSSP, and electronic health record (EHR) vendors when vendor-specific errors are identified, using a recent incident to illustrate and discuss how this collaboration can work to address suspected data anomalies.

Prior to June 2016, there were 45 registered users of syndromic surveillance data in Washington State, with 29 (64.4%) representing 5 of Washington’s 35 local health jurisdictions and 16 (35.6%) at the state level. Of those registered users, 9 (8.8%) had logged into ESSENCE at least once in the 6 months before October 2016. In June 2016, the Washington State syndromic surveillance program began accepting Meaningful Use data and sought to increase its user base. To accomplish this, the Washington State Department of Health (WA DOH) designated a staff member to oversee outreach efforts to increase the visibility of syndromic data in the state, including the establishment of a Community of Practice.

Objective:

To grow and facilitate a community of syndromic surveillance data users in Washington State, improving and expanding local syndromic practice.