National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS ...

PHASE II Task 3 Deliverable
Directory. The BOH will design business rules to ensure data confidentiality to permit
selectively authorized, read-only access to data housed in selected program area modules
(PAMs) based on specific user’s roles and responsibilities. The data will be accessible to
specific commercial software (e.g., standards-based statistical packages, GIS packages) to
support related data analysis and visualization activities, and to support the electronic exchange
of laboratory, clinical, and epidemiological data between the state, and other providers and
laboratories (dependent on licensing agreements).
The currently proposed e-business plan addresses the important and previously unavailable
attribute of these disparate data systems that will allow web browser-based development of
clinical and public health management reports for improving case management. Selective,
confidential, data reporting, querying and messaging functions will be available for authorized
users to extend the use of NEDSS data, linked to demographic and disease data, to provide
integrated reports of patient demographics, laboratory results, and disease history. E-business
would involve periodic reports and case reports available from BOH, or through the query
feature for user-generated, ad hoc clinical and management reports. Reports will be available for
local stakeholders, with aggregate reports for data comparisons, and individual case reports
available for specific data laboratory providers (to safeguard issues of patient confidentiality) as
well as state and local public health agencies. Out-of-state laboratories would need to access
specific data through the CDC.
The capability to query and generate these resultant reports offers value-added identification,
communication and program response to directly address public health issues of changes in
disease incidence, severity, treatment, and prevention. Local public health agencies and
laboratories can be alerted electronically about specific disease states, rates, and data monitoring
and reporting requirements to improve detection and treatment management. In addition to these
clinical processes and outcomes, the query and reporting functions allow government and
clinical laboratories to access aggregated state-wide data that was unavailable previously or
available only in hard copy reports by county. These data may be used to enhance financial
projections of provider business costs and/or public health program costs, to compare and
contrast competitive patterns and projections, and to improve quality assurance through
management control and management decision-making that affects patients, communities, public
health agencies, and commercial providers alike.
III. Costs and Benefits
E-business costs are anticipated to be negligible. The initial development of NEDSS has already
contemplated the system architecture, design, linkages, and maintenance requirements for the
query and reporting functions. The various user communities will need computer equipment and
maintenance for access to the web browser, but most if not all components should already exist
to meet the previously mandated data entry requirements for reporting the relevant laboratory
tests to the BOH data repository. The user communities may need some minor computer
software training to effectively utilize the software capabilities to query and produce reports, but
these costs should be very low. And, it is anticipated that instructions on how to access NEDDS
will be available on-line.
Conversely, the benefits of NEDDS from an e-business perspective are significant. In addition to
PHRG 2 of 5
September 28, 2001