Page 52 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

These data are necessary to:

• Identify disease and population trends (e.g. the patterns and spread of disease within a
community);
• Monitor at-risk populations (e.g. monitoring hepatitis C infection rates in an IV drug rehabilitation
center);

• Conduct case investigation and implement disease-specific control measures to prevent further
spread;

• Prevent and contain outbreaks;
• Promote disease testing and education initiatives;

• Evaluate control measures, programs, and policy. 21

Nationally notifiable disease notification often relies on a laboratory-confirmed diagnosis, which can
create significant process-level delays in data transmission as a result of the elapsed time between disease
onset and physician consultation, the physician ordering the test, and the laboratory conducting testing
22
and reporting confirmed results. These manual reporting burdens exacerbate the process-level delays at
the state and local level, and thus serve as barriers to the NNDSS functionality.

As part of CDC’s Surveillance Strategy, NNDSS is undergoing a transformation to keep pace with evolving
technology and data exchange standards. This overhaul—known and the NNDSS Modernization
Initiative (NMI)—aims to enhance timely and accurate data for public health decision making through
interoperability and standardized data exchange mechanisms. Working closely with public health
departments and public health laboratories, NMI has helped implement case notification messages to
CDC. Continued improvements like NMI must be prioritized to ensure timely data exchange from state,
territorial, local, and tribal jurisdictions to CDC.

21 Swaan C, van den Broek A, Kretzschmar M, Richardus JH. Timeliness of notification systems for infectious diseases: A systematic literature review. PLoS One. 2018;13(6):e0198845. Published June
14, 2018. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0198845
22 Ibid.

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