The National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) comprises many activities including collaborations, processes, standards, and systems which support gathering data from US states and territories. As part of NNDSS, the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) provides the standards, tools, and resources to support reporting public health jurisdictions (jurisdictions). The NEDSS Base System (NBS) is a CDC-developed, software application available to jurisdictions to collect, manage, analyze and report national notifiable disease (NND) data. An evaluation of NEDSS with the objective of identifying the functionalities of NC systems and the impact of these features on the user’s culture is underway.
Objective
The culture by which public health professionals work defines their organizational objectives, expectations, policies, and values. These aspects of culture are often intangible and difficult to qualify. The introduction of an information system could further complicate the culture of a jurisdiction if the intangibles of a culture are not clearly understood. This report describes how cultural modeling can be used to capture intangible elements or factors that may affect NEDSS-compatible (NC) system functionalities within the culture of public health jurisdictions.