Reportable Disease

Current influenza-like illness monitoring in Idaho is on the basis of syndromic surveillance using laboratory data, combined with periodic person-to-person reports collected by Idaho state workers. This system relies on voluntary reporting. Electronic medical records with relational databases offer a method of obtaining data in an automated fashion. Clinical data entered in CPRS includes real-time visit information, vital signs, ICD-9, pharmacy, and labs. ICD-9 and vital signs have been used to predict influenza-like illness in automated systems. We sought to combine these with lab and pharmacy data as part of an automated syndromic surveillance system.

Objective

The objective of this paper is to study whether syndromic surveillance using data from the Veterans Administration electronic medical record computerized patient record system (CPRS) correlates to officially reported influenza activity levels in the State of Idaho.

Florida Department of Health has developed a statewide syndromic surveillance system based on the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics (ESSENCE). Authorized users can currently access data from the Florida Poison Information Center Network (FPICN), Emergency Room chief complaints, Florida reportable disease system (Merlin) and the Florida death records through ESSENCE under one portal. The purpose of this paper is to summarize efforts to enhance statewide real-time chemical surveillance by incorporating FPICN data into ESSENCE.

State laws mandate clinicians and laboratories to report occurrences of reportable diseases to public health entities. For this purpose, a set of case-reporting specifications are published and maintained by public health departments. There are several problems with the existing case-reporting specifications: (1) they are described on individual state websites and posters and not structured or executable; (2) the specifications are often misleading representing case classification rather than case reporting criteria; (3) they vary across jurisdictions and change over time; and (4) reporting facilities are required to interpret the criteria and maintain logic in their own systems. To overcome these problems, we are designing and developing a prototype system to represent case-reporting specifications that can be authored and maintained by public health and published openly.

Objective

In this paper, we describe the content and functional requirements for a knowledge management system that can be authored by public health authorities to inform reporting facilities ‘what’s reportable where’.

When a reportable condition is identified, clinicians and laboratories are required to report the case to public health authorities. These case reports help public health officials to make informed decisions and implement appropriate control measures to prevent the spread of disease. Incomplete or delayed case reports can result in new occurrences of disease that could have been prevented. To improve the disease reporting and surveillance processes, the Utah Department of Health is collaborating with Intermountain Healthcare and the University of Utah to electronically transmit case reports from healthcare facilities to public health entities using Health Level Seven v2.5, SNOMED CT, and LOINC. As part of the Utah Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics, we conducted an observation study in 2009 to identify metrics to evaluate the impact of electronic systems. We collected baseline data in 2009 and in this paper we describe preliminary results from a follow-up study conducted in 2010.

Objective

This paper describes a comparison study conducted to identify quality of reportable disease case reports received at Salt Lake Valley health department in 2009 and 2010.