How the NBS Changed Surveillance Business Practices in Alabama

In this presentation we will describe how day-to-day operations of state surveillance staff were affected when the NEDSS Base System was implemented in Alabama as a new technology to support our transition from the legacy NETSS format to national NEDSS standards. Alabama began its transition from NETSS to NEDSS in calendar year 2003, culminating in a statewide implementation for all General Communicable, Hepatitis, Vaccine Preventable and Bacterial Meningitis and Invasive Respiratory Diseases in October of 2006. During this process, new tools and methods have been developed and implemented within Alabama in order to improve statewide use of the NBS. Changes in technology often create challenges and opportunities that affect business practices, training, analysis, monitoring, and other operations. In order to improve surveillance in an efficient manner it became evident that we would need to collaborate with other NBS states to gather lessons learned, recognize areas in need of process improvements, as well as to include and expand best practices. Therefore, a consistent feature of many of these new tools and methods developed within Alabama is the collaborative environments in which they have been developed. This presentation will address some of the business process solutions that have evolved from this collaborative environment; including system integration interfaces, training materials, and analysis, visualization and reporting tools. These new tools and methods have potentially benefited other NBS states, and conceptually should be of benefit to other States with NEDSS-compliant data systems.