News Article -- January 22, 2007

Wyoming Dept of Health Adopts the CSC Public Health Surveillance ASP Model

ATLANTA, Ga., December 4, 2006 – Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), in partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the State of Wyoming Department of Health, today announced the 14th production implementation of the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Base System (NBS). This installation is a significant achievement as it marks the second NBS state to adopt the CSC NEDSS Application Service Provider (ASP) model. The State of Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services was the initial adopter of the NBS using the NEDSS ASP model in October, 2006.

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. Clay Van Houten, State of Wyoming Department of Health Epidemiologist, remarked “We had been working on implementing NEDSS locally for several years without much success. By using the ASP solution we were able to have NEDSS up and running in a matter of about 6 months. The CSC team was great to work with and was able to offer helpful insight along the way based on their knowledge of working with other states.”

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 14 states with a total user base exceeding 850 public health practitioners. The NBS is used within these states to conduct public health surveillance activities for a total population of 52,701,119 persons according to the 2000 census data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This corresponds to roughly one fifth of the U.S. population. 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

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