Page 41 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

• A new notifiable disease system developing nationally but not yet
available to SCHD is a massive undertaking to standardize and
implement Electronic Case Reporting (eCR). This system automatically
pulls specific disease reports from electronic health records at clinical
care organizations, and reports to public health without manual
intervention. This improves medical provider-required disease
reporting timeliness. In Kansas, KDHE implementation of eCR will
benefit SCHD by decreasing the time to begin disease investigations
and control measures.
• Through KDHE, SCHD participates in the National Syndromic
Surveillance Program (NSSP) BioSense Platform, and is a Kansas leader
in analysis of emergency department trends and evaluation of new
processes to track health issues such as measles and opioid overdose.
Sedgwick County would benefit from expansion of NSSP to include
urgent care and outpatient clinics to gain a greater community-wide
picture of disease trends.
• Although maintained by KDHE, Vital Records System data—composed
of birth, marriage, divorce, stillbirth, and death records—is used
extensively by SCHD for monitoring health outcomes, including suicide
and infant mortality. For suicide prevention in Sedgwick County, the
current state Vital Records System does not supply enough information
and the data is not timely. Therefore, throughout each year, SCHD
performs manual full case file reviews from multiple sources, manually
entering that information into an internally-created database. An
electronic Vital Records System that automates and standardizes
reporting of hospital, medical provider, and medical examiner records
to public health would speed availability of the data to SCHD to
decrease the number of people who die by suicide.

Resources to build a trained data workforce and non-siloed, interoperable data
systems at public health agencies are important for SCHD as it works with
partners and continually strives for timely and effective disease surveillance
and reporting. Investment to modernize the public health surveillance
enterprise will ensure effective internal processes and external collaboration
with partners to protect the health of communities across the United States.