Qualitative Methods

The importance transmitting clinical information to public health for disease surveillance is well-documented. Conventional reporting processes require health care providers to complete paper-based notifiable condition reports which are transmitted by fax and mail to public health agencies. These processes result in incomplete reports, inconsistencies in reporting frequencies among different diseases and reporting delays as well as time-consuming follow-up by public health to get needed information. One strategy to address these issues is to electronically pre-populate report forms with available clinical, lab and patient data to streamline reporting workflows, increase data completeness and, ultimately, provide access to more timely and accurate surveillance data for public health organizations. Prior to implementing an intervention that includes using pre-populated forms, we conducted interviews in clinical and public health settings to identify the barriers and facilitators to adopting and utilizing the forms and their potential impact on workflow and perceived burden. These interviews are a component of a larger mixed methods evaluation that will triangulate pre- and post-intervention quantitative data quality measures with qualitative results.

Objective

Introduction of new health information technologies can produce unanticipated consequences on existing user behaviors, workflow, etc. Prior to implementing a public health reporting intervention, we conducted a series of interviews regarding workflow and perceptions of task burden with respect to notifiable condition reporting.

For more than a decade, biosurveillance systems (and more recently BioSense) have been employed in the United States. Efforts to drastically expand these surveillance capacities have been a national priority given concerns about national security. However, there has been little emphasis on value or increasing value to communities or agencies contributing and analyzing data. This qualitative analysis focused on all biosurveillance stakeholders and the opportunity to enhance interoperability and reuse of data and systems.

Objective

To understand the perspective of biosurveillance stakeholders and how their participation creates value for them as well as public health departments.