Abstract: Multi-Jurisdictional Information Sharing During the 2009 Presidential Inaugural (7th Annual Public Health Information Network (PHIN) Conference)

Monday, August 31, 2009: 1:30 PM

Baker

Wayne A. Loschen, MS , JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD

Richard Seagraves, BS , JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD

Rekha Holtry, MPH , JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD

Joseph Lombardo, MS , JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD

Sheri Happel Lewis, MPH , JHU Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD

The 2009 U.S. Presidential Inauguration attracted over a million people to the National Capital Region (NCR) of Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. This mass gathering event is an example of a public health surveillance activity that requires support from multiple jurisdictions to share information in order to grasp an overall view of the health across the region where Inaugural activities will occur.

The objective of this project was to develop and evaluate a model for an information sharing system that encourages public health officials to share concerns and preliminary investigation results among multiple jurisdictions at the county, state, and federal levels. The messages / information being shared should adequately describe the situation without requiring aggregated or identifiable data to be exposed, while allowing the user to enter more detailed information if it is required to describe the event.

For 10 days before and after the 2009 Presidential Inauguration, public health officials in the NCR and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) participated in enhanced disease surveillance using the information sharing model. The users in the NCR monitored their populations using emergency room chief complaints, over-the-counter drug sales, aid station reports, poison control reports, and school absenteeism in their ESSENCE systems. The CDC users monitored the NCR by reviewing military office visits, Veteran’s Affairs office visits, emergency room chief complaints, and laboratory data in the national BioSense surveillance system. All participants had the ability to log into the secure Information Sharing website to post messages about any potential health risk they have discovered. They were then able to view and share additional findings using this model for information sharing in a prototype message exchange system.

We will describe the results of the project along with the lessons learned from our experience.

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20926 Multi-Jurisdictional Information Sharing During the 2009 Presidential Inaugural