Public health data elements and value sets described in CSTE position statements are foundation building blocks of Public Health Case Reporting (PHCR), ELR and Case Notification. This session will illustrate the process and importance of standardizing the data elements as well as collaborative strategy to distribute the data elements and value sets using the existing tools and applications such as National Cancer Institute caDSR CDE browser and CDC Vocabulary Server (VADS).

When healthcare providers encounter a patient with a reportable disease, public health authorities request information in a public health case report (PHCR). ‘Position Statements’ published by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) are pdf documents for each reportable condition that include a section where the requested information is specified in an unstructured format, leading to unintended ambiguity and unnecessary variation. The CDC/CSTE Case Report Standardization Workgroup (CRSWg) identified a need to standardize data elements across Position Statements and improve automated access to sharable and standardized question sets.

The first panelist will describe efforts to standardize content in the Position Statements, including the reporting logic and the case report content.  After analyzing the 2010 CSTE Position Statements, we developed a tool to validate logic and are developing a framework to harmonize data elements and model the questions for EHR extraction or human review. The panelist, graduate informatics students, CRSWg, and epidemiologists that authored Position Statements have been collaborating to review and improve Position Statement standardization.

The second panelist will describe a project using the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) cancer data standards repository (caDSR) for recording core data elements relevant for over 80 reportable conditions, as well as Acute Hepatitis B and Cancer Position Statements.  The CDC hopes to reuse NCI tools and data elements. NCI has an initiative to standardize data elements and terminology and a library of harmonized case report forms (CRFs) used for clinical trials. The caDSR captures data elements and CRFs in a computable and human readable form for sharing and dissemination via web browsers and APIs. The project will reuse NCI resources to meet CDC needs, while extending caDSR content to include infectious disease and CDC cancer registry data elements.

Panelists will discuss their experience with these efforts that may converge toward an interoperable framework.