Potential Improvement in Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification Attributable to Electronic Laboratory Reporting — Florida, 2002–2006

Potential Improvement in Timeliness of Infectious Disease Notification Attributable to Electronic Laboratory Reporting — Florida, 2002–2006

Background/Goals: Annually, Florida receives >30,000 reports of notifiable infectious diseases. Delays in reporting can hamper effective case and outbreak investigation, permitting disease transmission. We assessed the impact of electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) on timeliness.

Methods: We examined timeliness of reporting for confirmed cases of salmonellosis, shigellosis, meningococcal disease, and hepatitis A. The medians of three time intervals were calculated: (A) symptom onset to laboratory report, (B) symptom onset to county health department (CHD) notification, and (C) laboratory report to CHD notification. We calculated the percentage of laboratory-confirmed cases reported to CHDs within one and two incubation periods of symptom onset for each disease (interval B) and estimated improvements in reporting if ELR decreased interval C to 1 day.

Results: One percent of laboratory-confirmed salmonellosis cases and 28% of shigellosis cases reach the attention of CHDs within two incubation periods of symptom onset (interval B). However, >80% of meningococcal disease and >90% of hepatitis A cases reach CHDs within this time frame. If the median duration of interval C was decreased to 1 day, salmonellosis reporting within two incubation periods would increase to 9.5% and shigellosis to 60.3%. Minimal improvements would occur for meningococcal disease and hepatitis A.

Conclusions: Delays in reporting compromise timely case and outbreak detection and might allow disease transmission. ELR would appreciably shorten relative time from laboratory report to CHD notification for salmonellosis and shigellosis, but only minimally for hepatitis A and meningococcal disease. For selected infections, ELR might shorten reporting delays enough to limit secondary and tertiary disease transmission. Further improvements in reporting timeliness might require decreasing the interval from symptom onset to definitive diagnosis.