Integrating workflow processes with a reportable disease data management system, New Jersey's experiences

New Jersey has developed the state-of-the-art patient-centric Communicable Disease Reporting and Surveillance System (CDRSS) to track multiple instances of various notifiable diseases occurring in a person. CDRSS provides the ability to perform detailed investigations, including contract tracing and outbreak management. CDRSS is a secure, web-based, PHIN-compliant system, enabled to receive HL7 messages from clinical laboratories.  CDRSS has extensive report generating capabilities that allow data to be viewed as tables, charts, graphs and maps. For general CDRSS users, the system can display a range of reports including analysis such as temporal comparisons for tracking an outbreak. Over 175 options are available for generating disease reports by defining user specific parameters. Several management reports are available for analyzing case management and resource utilization for individuals, groups and organizations.  All reports can be exported into several formats including Excel and delimited formats for more sophisticated analysis with statistical and geospatial software.  All cases reported into CDRSS are mapped in order to determine the appropriate jurisdiction for investigation. In addition to the transactional database, CDRSS maintains a point-in-time snapshot of the database reflecting the day the year-end final disease counts were submitted to CDC, which users may use for additional analytic purposes. The success of CDRSS is largely due to the user perception that the system helps them analyze the data and easily generate reports for streamlining workflows, prioritizing investigations, providing more complete data, and compiling data for distribution, planning, and funding purposes.