Using An Extensible Open Source Services Platform to Enable Data Feeds to Georgia Division of Public Health's SENDSS Surveillance System

Georgia Division of Public Health (GA DPH) currently collects emergency department (ED) data from 37 Georgia hospitals and urgent care facilities on a daily basis to populate their in-house developed State Electronic Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (SENDSS). Feeder facilities provide their ED data in a flat file format and transfer it to GA DPH via secure file transfer protocol (SFTP). GA DPH then forwards the data from 27 of the most established facilities to the BioSense system at CDC via PHIN MS.

In collaboration with the BioSense Program, GA DPH has undertaken an effort to pilot the new Cardea open source HL7 message transformation services with a Georgia healthcare facility. Rather than sending the current flat file via SFTP, this site will use Cardea to send a standardized HL7 2.5 message set to SENDSS via PHIN MS. Messages from this site will be transmitted on a near real-time basis; versus daily, as is the case with most of existing SENDSS feeder hospitals. Data from this new facility will also be added to GA DPH’s existing feed to BioSense, expanding BioSense’s coverage in the state.

By investing in the implementation of this new technology, GA DPH will immediately receive in real time a richer, more standardized data set for possible inclusion in their SENDSS system. In the future, it will also position this hospital to easily extend the Cardea services used to include new functionality such as Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR) of infectious diseases and support for local disease case detection.

This presentation will describe the objectives of the Georgia Cardea pilot project, the status of the implementations at the pilot site, and the outcomes achieved to date by this collaboration.