Epi Gateway - A One-Stop Surveillance Shop

Title: Epi Gateway: A One-Stop Surveillance Shop

 Authors: Christie Luce, BA & Janet Hamilton, MPH

 Background:

 

The Florida Department of Health has a central office in Tallahassee and 67 county health departments (CHDs). Within the central office, five bureaus practice notifiable disease surveillance: Immunizations, Epidemiology, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD), HIV/AIDS, and Community Environmental Health.  In many county health departments, one person will perform duties related to all of these areas and routinely use several different stand-alone applications to record and extract data.

 Method:

 Epi Gateway is an information technology system developed by the Florida Bureau of Epidemiology to serve as a single point of entry for applications related to disease surveillance.  The application serves as a portal for: Merlin, the state’s repository for all notifiable diseases except STD’s HIV/AIDS, and TB, used by CHD staff; PRISM, the repository for notifiable sexually transmitted diseases; ESSENCE, the state’s syndromic surveillance application; the National Retail Data Monitor;  web-based case reporting by hospital Infection Control Practitioners; county influenza activity level reporting; Pneumonia & Influenza Mortality reporting; and Respiratory Syncytial Virus reporting.    Each of these applications has both data entry and data display and analysis features. In addition to a user name and password, users are assigned roles based on their job duties.  Users see only links to applications appropriate to their roles and only have to remember one username and password.

 

 

Results:

 This presentation will cover the look and feel of the application, to demonstrate seamless movement between applications, including data entry and visualization, and the single sign-on feature.

 Conclusion:

 

Epi Gateway solves the problem of cost prohibitive full-scale system integration by providing access to what appears to be one large application, but is actually several smaller ones. Users may be more inclined to enter data and watch disease trends when they only have one username and password to remember.