Streamlining Analysis and Reporting for the Outbreak Management System

Background: Tennessee (TN) implemented the Outbreak Management System (OMS), created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to meet the needs of complex investigations. Information management during investigations often becomes cumbersome, hindering public health investigation activities. OMS was designed to respond to public health emergencies.  It provides methods of capturing standardized data, configuring outbreak-specific vocabularies and packages; performing analyses; and creating dynamic questionnaires and reports. Given the nature of the application, intimate analysis, visualization, and reporting requires familiarity of relational. Such skills are typically reserved for more technically savvy personnel. TN developed a business process aimed at streamlining reporting and accessing data using commonly available commercial software products. Such methods allows for data to be transformed into information, knowledge, and action in a timely and efficiently manner.

 

Objective: To facilitate use of OMS in complex investigations in Tennessee, a streamlined approach to reporting and accessing data was developed.

 

Methods: To facilitate report writing and generation against complex data schemas in OMS, a streamlined business report methodology was adopted, including standardized report templates, rewriting complex views in the OMS Analysis database into a more intuitive and user-friendly structure to minimize the number of table views that will be required to be called and joined in the report, and providing report writers a comprehensive data model and dictionary of the simplified data schema. To support our endeavor, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 was employed as the database backend and Business Object’s Crystal Reports XI was used as the de facto standard reporting tool.

 

Conclusions: OMS is a powerful, flexible tool which can greatly impact management of complex investigations. While the database structure is complex, methods can be implemented to provide public health the information they need quickly, efficiently, and effectively to manage investigations.