Leveraging Biosurveillance Infrastructure for Infectious Disease Laboratory Result Reporting to Public Health

The mission of the Texas NEDSS Project is to provide a standards-based disease surveillance infrastructure that will promote the storage and electronic exchange of information, integrate surveillance and health information systems, provide methods for analyzing trends and detecting public health problems, and supply information for setting public health policy.
As an activity to fulfill that mission, the Texas NEDSS Project has been working with the CDC and the CHRISTUS Health system to leverage the BioSense biosurveillance infrastructure implemented at Christus to also report infectious disease laboratory results to the public health.  The Texas-based CHRISTUS Health began sending data to BioSense in April of 2008 from 11of their hospitals.  As a part of the project, the BioSense Integrator was utilized to produce both BioSense Lab messages and Electronic Laboratory Result (ELR) messages from a single inbound lab feed. The re-identified ELR messages are sent via PHINMS from four Texas facilities to the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) whenever a positive result for a reportable organism is received by their BioSense Integrator system.

 The Texas NEDSS Project is also working together with CDC to evaluate their current business processes for timeliness and completeness of reporting and determine what changes made to their business process utilizing the ELR feed improved overall result reporting efficiency.