News Article -- January 29, 2007

Rhode Island Dept of Health Adopts the CSC Public Health Surveillance ASP Model

ATLANTA, Ga., December 7, 2006 – Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the State of Rhode Island Department of Health, today announced the 15th production implementation of the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Base System (NBS). This installation is also a significant achievement as it marks the third NBS state to adopt the CSC NEDSS Application Service Provider (ASP) model. Other states adopting the NEDSS ASP NBS hosted application model include the States of Montana and Wyoming.

Sally Johnson, the State of Rhode Island NBS Project Manager, remarked “using a hosted solution allowed our nurses and epidemiologists to focus their attention on their work and to better customize and utilize the application to meet the disease surveillance needs of the State."

The NEDSS ASP model was created to provide a stable, secure, scalable environment for the hosting of enterprise public health surveillance applications and to enable state and local public health departments to utilize leading edge technologies while minimizing their total cost of ownership.

Key benefits of the CSC NEDSS ASP model for state participants include:

• Use of CSC’s state-of-the-art data center following International Standards Organization (ISO) 9001 certified processes and an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant problem management system.
  
• Reduced hardware and software procurement cycles
  
• Reduced need for operational maintenance personnel to support the hosted application
  
• Hardware exceeding minimum application requirements for enhanced application performance and to facilitate the adoption of all application modules
  
• A robust user authentication mechanism providing access to the hosted application from anywhere on the Internet at any time

The NBS is a mature and stable production system that provides flexible, advanced public health surveillance capabilities. As of December 2006, the NBS is in production use in 16 states with a total user base exceeding 875 public health practitioners. The NBS is currently used within these states to conduct public health surveillance activities for a total population of 53,749,438 persons according to the 2000 census data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In support of local and state public health surveillance, the NEDSS Base System (NBS) has been used to report a quarter of a million electronic messages containing disease data to the CDC since January 2003.

About NEDSS
The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) is a CDC initiative that promotes the use of data and information system standards to advance the development of efficient, integrated, and interoperable surveillance systems at federal, state and local levels. It is a major component of the Public Health Information Network (PHIN).

This broad initiative is designed to (1) detect outbreaks rapidly and to monitor the health of the nation, (2) facilitate the electronic transfer of appropriate information from clinical information systems in the health care system to public health departments, (3) reduce provider burden in the provision of information, and (4) enhance both the timeliness and quality of information provided.

For More Information
Read a case study about CSC’s role in developing and supporting NEDSS.

Read about other CSC projects in the public health arena.

Read about NEDSS on the CDC Web site.