Successful Collaboration and Leveraging of a Vendor-Based Surveillance and Tracking System to Allow Public Health Jurisdictions to Meet PHIN Requirements in a More Cost-Effective Manner

Summary: Purchase of the same configurable commercial off the shelf (COTS) solution for surveillance and case management lead to increased collaboration between the public health (PH) jurisdictions of Massachusetts (MA), North Carolina (NC), and Connecticut (CT). Our discussion will describe benefits and difficulties of this type of partnership as jurisdictions work to meet PHIN requirements.

Background: In 2005, both the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) and North Carolina Department of Public Health (NC DPH) purchased MAVEN, a COTS product developed by Consilience Software, Inc. In 2008, after a vendor failure for a similar product, the Connecticut Department of Public Health (CT DPH) also purchased MAVEN. All three states have MAVEN in production; MA DPH since September 2006, NC DPH since September, 2006, and CT DPH since July 2008.

Methods: MAVEN has configurations based in xml-format, allowing clients to share configurations resulting in cost and time savings. For example, both the NC DPH and the CT DPH obtained the MDPH configurations for vaccine preventable and general epidemiology notifiable diseases as a starting point for modifications. Additional shared configurations have included: Outbreak Management, Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD), Tuberculosis (TB), and Lead surveillance. Each state also leveraged MAVEN to meet various other public health needs.

Results: Currently, the three states combined have approximately a million reports of notifiable diseases in production. All three states can generate NETSS data extracts and are working on PHIN messaging for Varicella and TB certification. Clients use a web-based issue tracking software and wiki to share information and best practices.

Discussion: We will show how this active collaborative framework could benefit other public health entities while demonstrating how disparate business requirements can be supported by one core product. It is clear that collaboration has allowed us to better leverage resources and knowledge in building needed PH infrastructure.