Open Source Disease Surveillance System Demonstration

The Utah Department of Health (UDOH) and Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) have created a partnership to develop an open source disease surveillance system, which is PHIN-compliant and National Electronic Disease Surveillance System- (NEDSS) compatible. CSI and UDOH have established a cooperative agreement to create the system using open source software best practices and Lean and Agile software planning and development methodologies. The project began in December 2007 when CSI, in collaboration with state and local health department representatives, produced a two-year project roadmap, which identified 23 releases to be completed during a two-year period. The first release, confidential morbidity report (CMR), was completed in April 2008. The next six releases, to be delivered iteratively during 2008, include additional core data elements applying to most reportable diseases, configurable case investigation forms, reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), data export, de-duplication, and import of legacy data. This functionality was identified as the minimum needed to replace Utah’s National Electronic Telecommunication System for Surveillance (NETSS)-based surveillance system. The roadmap also includes the development of tools to assist public health with the following activities: case management, management of longitudinal data, contact tracing/management, case load management, electronic laboratory reporting, analysis and visualization, outbreak management, and disconnected (offline) client activities. The following sets of functionality will be demonstrated during the presentation: user role specific dashboard, Confidential Morbidity Report (CMR), case investigation forms (including configurable forms and case routing), system administration console, CDC integration, security features, and the open source community collaboration website supporting the project.