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Sunday, August 30, 2009
Grand Hall/Exhibit Hall
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC DOHMH) widely uses the Public Health Information Network Messaging System (PHINMS) to receive secure public health data from many business partners (i.e., laboratories, hospitals, vendors). Over 2,500 files are transmitted daily to the NYC DOHMH via PHINMS to support various disease surveillance programs. These programs rely heavily on timely data transmitted through PHINMS for syndromic surveillance and patient services at public health clinics. Ensuring that data is received in a timely manner and being able to quickly diagnose and resolve data transmission or processing issues have become a challenging system monitoring activity.
From the time a report is first submitted from a reporting facility to the time it is finally analyzed by disease surveillance programs at the NYC DOHMH, many applications and systems are involved. Any failure or less than desirable performance of one single application could cause a delay in data transmission and processing. When a delay occurs, reviewing system event logs is the standard practice for diagnosing the cause of the problem. However, this is often time consuming, in part because event logs at reporting facilities usually are not easily accessible to the PHINMS team.
As a resolution to these monitoring obstacles, the receiving date/time variable was added to a SQL sender table. With this addition, calculating the time difference between the time a file is received and sent out through PHINMS allows us to track the performance of the PHINMS sender and receiver applications. Moreover, the new variable made it possible to identify network connectivity issues by comparing time lags between two consecutive records in the SQL reference table. The PHINMS team found that querying date/time variables in SQL reference tables can be a cost-effective way to monitor timeliness of file transmissions.
From the time a report is first submitted from a reporting facility to the time it is finally analyzed by disease surveillance programs at the NYC DOHMH, many applications and systems are involved. Any failure or less than desirable performance of one single application could cause a delay in data transmission and processing. When a delay occurs, reviewing system event logs is the standard practice for diagnosing the cause of the problem. However, this is often time consuming, in part because event logs at reporting facilities usually are not easily accessible to the PHINMS team.
As a resolution to these monitoring obstacles, the receiving date/time variable was added to a SQL sender table. With this addition, calculating the time difference between the time a file is received and sent out through PHINMS allows us to track the performance of the PHINMS sender and receiver applications. Moreover, the new variable made it possible to identify network connectivity issues by comparing time lags between two consecutive records in the SQL reference table. The PHINMS team found that querying date/time variables in SQL reference tables can be a cost-effective way to monitor timeliness of file transmissions.