Onboarding

In the U.S., federal programs are accelerating the meaningful use of electronic health record (EHR) technology and encouraging greater standardization in how governmental public health agencies (PHAs) establish surveillance data partnerships with healthcare providers. To qualify for the benefits of these federal programs (a.k.a., Meaningful Use), healthcare professionals and hospitals must determine: 1) Whether their jurisdictional PHA collects health data for immunization or cancer registries, reportable diseases, and/or syndromic surveillance; and 2) If the PHA does collect this data, then they must register for data on-boarding with the PHA and actively work with them to establish on-going data exchange. These requirements are predicated on participating state and local PHAs either establishing new or expanding the capacity of their existing public health data reporting services. To assist state and local PHAs in this effort, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) facilitates a national task force, known as the Stage 2 MU Public Health Reporting Requirements Task Force, which has recommended guidelines and clarified requirements for these new processes.

Objective

To exchange lessons learned and refine national guidelines for public health agencies to declare Meaningful Use readiness, register eligible professionals and hospitals for the public health meaningful use objectives, on-board data providers, and perform "on-going" data submission.

This paper describes the issues associated with the creation of a statewide emergency department syndromic surveillance system, part of the South Carolina Aberration Alerting Network (SCAAN), in a predominately rural state.

In 2017, the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) continued to expand as a national scope data source with over 6,500 facilities registered on the BioSense Platform, including 4,000 active, 1,800 onboarding, and 700 planned or inactive facilities. 2,086 of the active facilities are Emergency Departments across 49 sites in 41 states. The growth of data available in NSSP has been driven by continued enhancements to tools and processes used by the NSSP Onboarding Team. These enhancements help to rapidly integrate new healthcare facilities and onboard new public health sites in support of American Hospital Association (AHA) Emergency Department (ED) representativeness goals. Furthermore, with these improvements to the onboarding process, including the Master Facility Table update process and automated data validation reporting, NSSP has broadened stakeholder participation in the onboarding process.

Objective:

This session will present the impacts of enhancements made to National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) BioSense Platform Onboarding in 2017 from the perspective of CDC and public health jurisdictions.