CSC Creates National Electronic Disease Surveillance System

Recognizing that health surveillance is the cornerstone of public health decision making and practice, organizations at the federal, state and local levels use to maintain more than 100 information systems for health surveillance. In 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched development of the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) to harness the enormous power of this data and serve as the surveillance component of CDC's Public Health Information Network.

NEDSS: An Integrated Approach to Disease Surveillance

NEDSS is an Internet-based infrastructure for data accumulation and sharing. It provides a standards-based, integrated approach to disease surveillance. Because NEDSS connects public health surveillance systems to clinical information (from medical labs, for example), emerging public health threats and trends can be detected more quickly.

Late in 2000, CDC contracted with CSC to lead development of a NEDSS-compatible Base System (NBS), to be offered to state health departments and eventually to other organizations.

CDC and CSC jointly developed the public health conceptual model, data standards, software and systems infrastructure for NBS. Major technical challenges included supporting the sheer volume of data, integrating multiple disease-specific systems and addressing privacy concerns.

CSC used development tools and methodologies based on the SEI's Capability Maturity Model, Level 3, for software engineering. CSC also collaborated with CDC and others to develop a sharable logical datamodel for the Base System's Web-based modules, message specifications and data repositories.

NBS enables data entry via the Web and electronic interchange of laboratory data. These features place data entry as close as possible to data sources to reduce errors and speed reporting. NBS's patient-centric model supports a Virtual File that allows all public health events for a patient to be viewed from one central location. Patient data is connected to an integrated repository of data pertaining to hundreds of different diseases and conditions.

In 2005, recognizing that many state and local governments lacked resources to install and operate a system such as NEDSS. CDC announced that it would offer a hosted version of the NBS to accelerate implementation. CSC won the contract to act as NEDSS' application service provider and began that work in February 2006.

Results Are Positive

NEDSS is now in production and routinely informs public health officials of emergency room visits for specific diseases and monitors lab results to detect increased frequency of certain conditions. Because electronic data is transmitted automatically, epidemiological investigations are initiated much more quickly. Reporting time for communicable diseases has shrunk from around 24 days to 3 days, with a 300% increase in the number of laboratory reports to public health.