This panel provides an overview of strengths and weaknesses of the RCMT and SRCA in supporting public health reporting. We will also describe how SRCA and RCMT can be used as building blocks toward the development of a public health reporting knowledgebase containing information that health care entities and others require from public health to support reportable condition surveillance . Finally, we will explain the vision and requirements for a public health knowledgebase.

This panel provides an overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the Reportable Condition Mapping Table (RCMT) and State Reportable Conditions Assessment (SRCA) in supporting public health reporting.  We will also describe how SRCA and RCMT can use used as building blocks toward the development of a knowledgebase containing authoritative information needed by healthcare entities and healthcare information techology systems interacting with Public Health. Finally, we will explain the vision and requirements for a public health knowledgebase.

Currently case definition and reporting specifications and criteria exist as descriptive, human-readable documents; therefore, they are not easily assimilated and available for computer processing.  Because the criteria are not available in an executable and easily assimilated format, all reporters develop, implement, and maintain the detection and reporting algorithms in their own systems.  This system-by-system development can potentially result in inconsistent and incongruent algorithms; therefore, inconsistent and incongruent detection and reporting.  Further complicating these issues is the fact that the specifications and criteria differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction including different specifications and criteria at the local, state, national, and international levels.

The RCMT and SRCA present some of the needed criteria in a more computer-friendly presentation of reporting criteria.  RCMT contains value sets of lab test names and separate value sets of potential test results that may be included in detection logic for a reportable condition.  SRCA captures information about what conditions are reportable in each jurisdiction and which organization needs to report the condition.  The knowledge provided by these two resources are building blocks for a national system, but do not fully-specify the information required by laboratories or providers to implement public health reporting.  The knowledgebase seeks to build upon these two efforts to enable computerized case detection and reporting.