Development and Implementation of National Standards to Improve Public Health Case Reporting

Public health case reporting by clinicians, healthcare entities, and laboratories is a high priority national activity to ensure complete and timely surveillance and control of health threats. The presenters will provide an update on new standardized reporting criteria developed by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), and new implementation guides using Health Level seven (HL7) Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and version 2.5 message formats for electronic public health case reporting.

The first panelist will address CSTE reporting criteria. Standardized reporting definitions for Nationally Notifiable Conditions will help CSTE and CDC partners to achieve more complete, timely and automated case reporting. The new standards specify common and condition-specific data elements to be included in case reports, and should improve the ability of laboratories, hospitals, and providers operating within and across jurisdictions to comply with reporting requirements.

The second panelist will address the newly proposed HL7 CDA Public Health Case Report (PHCR) Implementation Guide (IG). CDA is HL7’s specification for standards-based exchange of clinical documents. Common data elements found in multiple states’ reportable condition forms were compiled and standardized in a project initiated in 2007 by the CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics and CSTE Case Report Standardization Workgroup. This IG will allow reporters to communicate data to state public health in an interoperable, industry-standard format.

The third panelist will address an extendable standards-based model for transmission of case reports from healthcare to public health using HL7 version 2.5. Investigators with the CDC-funded COE in Public Health Informatics in Utah developed and verified the model using content and workflow analysis.  Utah’s reportable conditions were mapped to SNOMED CT codes, and new concepts were requested to address problems identified.  Reporting between Intermountain Healthcare and the Utah Department of Health is underway; progress and challenges will be described.