The Evaluation of Notifiable Conditions Reporting Systems for a Large Municipal Local Public Health Agency

In the midst of national efforts to standardize notifiable conditions reporting processes, local public health agencies are beginning to adopt PHIN-compliant electronic notifiable conditions reporting systems. The adoption of such systems may have unforeseen effects on disease surveillance work, including the interruption of notifiable conditions reporting workflow, and the additional effort required to accommodate the use of multiple systems. The authors used observational analysis, task analysis, and scenarios of use to conduct a systematic comparison of the goals and tasks related to using two notifiable conditions reporting systems available to a large municipal local public health agency. This project is in progress at Public Health - Seattle & King County's (PHSKC) Communicable Disease Epidemiology and Immunization (CD-Imms) Section. The section is responsible for the surveillance and investigation of notifiable conditions in King County. Confirmed cases are reported to the Washington State Department of Health (WA DOH). Situated within the largest local public health agency in the state, PHSKC investigates between 5,000 and 6,000 cases each year. PHSKC analyzes surveillance data using an information system it developed. WA DOH has developed an online system for managing and reporting notifiable conditions, but evaluations by PHSKC suggest that it does not provide the features needed to optimally conduct local case management and data analysis efforts. Eleven staff members in the CD-Imms Section were interviewed and observed as they completed their daily work. The authors identified seventeen primary tasks and nine central goals associated with this work. These tasks and goals will be used to develop scenarios of use, which will describe how work will be completed assuming the implementation of the two different notifiable conditions reporting systems. By comparing these pairs of scenarios, the authors propose to compare the functionality of the two systems related to the needs of PHSKC.