Application to Display Electronic Messages for Public Health

Background: Public health surveillance requires that laboratories, hospitals and clinicians report selected notifiable conditions to public health authorities within a stipulated period. But, the reporting process is mostly paper-based and hence inefficient. There are multiple efforts to develop an electronic system for reporting in Utah. The Utah Department of Health (UDOH) is collaborating with Intermountain Healthcare, and University of Utah to develop an electronic system for case reporting and (add info on other reporting systems that the software can support).

Objective: Bureau of Epidemiology at UDOH are working on developing and implementing a system independent of UT-NEDSS to receive and display the reports received from the various sources.

Methods:: We used Rhapsody Engine to parse the electronic reports received and MySQL database to store the reports. PHP was used to create a portable open-source system to enable the public health practitioners to view the received electronic reports.

Results: The system we developed can display messages received in different formats (HL7, XML, and CSV). The system does not require the running of any applets and hence does not need to be loaded into the epidemiologist’s PC. A client-based approach is used in the epidemiologist’s administration rather than a conventional client-server based method. This reduces web requests from client to server and hence enables faster data entry. The system also allows the epidemiologist to take the appropriate action by viewing, accepting, or deleting electronic reportable condition reports.

Conclusion: We found the use of the PHP-MySQL combination to be a flexible, simple and effective approach for displaying electronic condition reports as an alternative to using a NEDSS base system.