CDC History of Tuberculosis Control - Medical and Public Health ...

Old TB recordkeeping system.
application will eventually occur. We can
envision a local department of health, with a
low-end (“thin”) computer and a browser,
logging in to a state or regional server to
securely send in interactively validated TB
data or to browse the results of some
descriptive trend analyses. We can also
envision a health maintenance organization
uploading data on a batch of TB suspects and
contacts to be worked up by local health
department staff. These data would be
subsequently sent to CDC without personal
identifiers, using a commonly agreed-upon
format. However, the speed with which
information technology is changing many
times hinders the wise selection of platforms,
software development tools, and practices that
permit the design of durable and reliable Webbased
surveillance systems.
The word integration is trendy nowadays.
However, integration is a value-laden term
that may mean consolidation to some, as in
block grants, while it may mean coordination
of efforts to others. TIMS might be considered
an integrated system: it integrates patient
management with surveillance data. And
TIMS will become fully integrated with other
information management systems once its data
import utilities are completed and a new
version is released complying with public
health, clinical, and laboratory informatics
standards now in development as part of the
CDC-wide surveillance integration efforts.
The future of TIMS hinges on the assumption
that TB will remain a categorically funded
program, possibly integrated with other
Notable Events in TB Control
57
disease-prevention efforts in a patient-centered
health care delivery model, but ultimately
accountable for its funding. Therefore, TIMS
will reflect this funding accountability by
protecting TB data integrity and its proper use
for program evaluation purposes.
Our organizational mission is to promote
health and quality of life by preventing,
controlling, and eventually eliminating TB
from the United States. Our National
Strategic Plan calls for a reduction of the TB
case rate to less than one per million
population by the year 2010. Therefore, we
need to leverage information technology to
manage, analyze, and synthesize practical
knowledge at the local, state, national, and
international level to facilitate the
organizational work that will move us closer
to that organizational objective.
Data are processed; information is managed;
knowledge empowers. Information becomes
knowledge, and thus power, when
systematically structured and functionally
organized for a specific purpose. But there is
one crucial premise in this line of reasoning:
the existence of an organizational will. An
organizational will requires commitment to
accomplish a mission, and that commitment
begins with a will to know. Once that
organizational will is present, and it certainly
is present in the TB prevention community,
TIMS is and will be ready to facilitate the
organizational work that will move us closer
to achieve our organizational objectives for the
year 2000 and beyond.
Field Services Activities
by Patricia M. Simone, MD
Chief, Field Services Branch
In the early 1960s, with the initiation of
categorical project grants, the Tuberculosis
Branch moved to Atlanta to join CDC, called
then the Communicable Disease Center. In
1974, the Tuberculosis Branch became the