Biosurveillance Systems Evaluation: Mayo/PHDSC Team Findings

Current public health surveillance and case investigation often involves manual reporting of cases to public health agencies and phone calls to healthcare providers for additional information on reported cases. The timeliness, completeness, and breadth of coverage of these manual processes can be problematic, especially during a public health emergency. With increasing amounts of healthcare and health-related data in electronic form, the progressive adoption and use of electronic health records and the move towards interoperable health information exchanges (HIEs) at the local, regional, state and national level, there are now significant opportunities to leverage health IT and HIE to better support public health practices for preparedness and disease surveillance. In order to build HIEs, there is a need to evaluate how existing public health surveillance information systems at the state and local levels and federal biosurveillance system will be integrated in the HIEs and in a Nationwide Health Information Network. This presentation describes the outcomes of the survey of the state and local public health surveillance systems in the three states. The goal of the survey was to understand on-going information exchanges related to biosurveillance within and across pubic health agencies and between public health and their healthcare partners, so these exchanges can be supported by HIEs. The presentation will describe the survey methodology including selection of the state sites and instrument development and will formulate a series of overall and state-specific findings.