It's not just a one-way street: Utilizing the PHINMS to transfer hospital ED syndromic data back to healthcare facilities

One solution for transferring public health information is by employing the Public Health Information Network Messaging System (PHINMS). The South Carolina Aberration Alerting Network (SCAAN) is a unified syndromic surveillance system for the analysis of data from: hospital ED chief-complaint, RODS NRDM, and Poison Control Center data. Specific to hospital surveillance, the SCAAN system is currently using PHINMS servers at hospitals to offer a more secure method of transferring de-identified chief-complaint data and establish a two-way intrastate data transfer network. An "autosend" program at each hospital automatically queues the data for PHINMS to send to DHEC where it's stored in a database. Then the data is extracted to the SC DHEC syndromic server. The raw chief-complaint data is then analyzed and a syndromic data set with corresponding charts and graphs are generated. Another "autosend" program at DHEC automatically queues the daily-generated hospital-specific output for PHINMS to send back to hospitals. A "data-extract" program was provided to hospitals to extract the received data to a specific directory for analysis. All the processes at hospitals and DHEC for the data transfer and analysis can be (or have been) setup to run automatically. Security certificates are used for authentication and authorization, and to encrypt and decrypt files. A PHINMS server and setup consultations are available to every hospital participating in the SCAAN system. A close partnership between hospital IT and SCDHEC IT personnel was crucial in implementing this process. This presentation will focus upon the SCAAN protocol for sending hospital-specific syndromic data back to the hospitals, via the PHINMS route, allowing hospitals the option to analyze their own data using the CDC Early Aberration Reporting Software (EARS) or simply visualizing interpreted data, and also successes and challenges experienced with this process.