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West Virginia Bureau for Public Health (BPH)
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WVEDSS PILOT PROJECT
Local Health Department Training Materials, January 2005
Disease Reporting Procedure During Pilot Project
WVEDSS Frequently Asked Questions
Future enhancements requested by WVEDSS pilot project users
Electronic Reporting
The Problem as defined by CDC:
Currently there are multiple systems in place that support communications for public health labs, the clinical community, and state and local health departments. Each has demonstrated the importance of being able to exchange health information. However, many of these systems operate in isolation, not capitalizing on the potential for a cross-fertilization of data exchange. A crosscutting and unifying framework is needed to better monitor these data streams for early detection of public health issues and emergencies. The Public Health Information Network (PHIN) is this framework.
A National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) is part
of the answer:
The vision of NEDSS is to have integrated surveillance systems that can transfer appropriate public health, laboratory, and clinical data efficiently and securely over the Internet. NEDSS will revolutionize public health by gathering and analyzing information quickly and accurately. This will help to improve the nation's ability to identify and track emerging infectious diseases and potential bio-terrorism attacks as well as to investigate outbreaks and monitor disease trends.
To learn more about the Public Health Information Network or the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System initiative, please see the following links to the website of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
http://www.cdc.gov/phin/
http://www.cdc.gov/nedss/West Virginia Electronic Disease Surveillance System
The State of West Virginia’s response to the NEDSS initiative will be the West Virginia Electronic Disease Surveillance System (WVEDSS).
A web-based electronic reporting system, WVEDSS serves health care providers, hospital and national reference laboratories, and local and state public health departments. In the past, reportable diseases were reported by providers and laboratories to public health on paper forms by fax and mail.
This system provides manual reporting of diseases as well as direct electronic transfer of laboratory results. Once fully implemented, this system will dramatically enhance disease surveillance, detection and response activities in West Virginia and minimize or eliminate the delays inherent in current paper-based systems.
WVEDSS presently supports reporting of all infectious diseases except sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis, but includes hepatitis B. It eventually will support all infectious disease surveillance in West Virginia.
Frequently Asked Questions regarding WVEDSS (status as of December, 2004):
Q: What is the current status of WVEDSS?
A: In March, 2004 the State of WV awarded a contract to Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC) to design and implement WVEDSS in WV.
During the past 2 years, STC implemented a NEDSS-compatible system in Michigan, Connecticut, North Dakota, and New York City.
The design and implementation of WVEDSS requires significant integration with an existing electronic immunization registry system to enable the sharing of existing hardware, third party software, personnel, and proprietary software code.
During April, 2004, a project management team was assembled in the Division of Surveillance and Disease Control (DSDC), WV Bureau for Public Health and in STC.
DSDC and STC teams completed system design requirements by September 2004. The system was installed in October, 2004.
A pilot project was begun to field test the system on November 15 and STC installed an interim version with enhancements on November 23. The pilot project will continue until December 31 and involves 5 WV hospitals, 9 WV local health departments, the state health department, the state laboratory (WV Office of Laboratory Services) and Lab Corp (a national reference lab).
Full state-wide deployment to all WV local health departments, all health providers and laboratories is planned for 2005.
Q: How much will WVEDSS cost?
A: The total system cost including hardware, third-party software, and professional services is approximately $1.3 million. Funding for WVEDSS is being provided jointly by the federal Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity and Threat Preparedness grants.
Q: Who can I contact about WVEDSS?
A: You may contact the following people:
Loretta Haddy, State Epidemiologist, at (304) 558-5358
Robert Fernatt, WVEDSS IT Manager, at (304) 558-6463
