National Electronic Disease Surveillance Assessment: CSTE's Assessment of Electronic Disease Surveillance in the States

In the spring of 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first issued a request for proposals for states and local health departments to begin designing, building and implementing integrated, web-based, electronic disease surveillance systems. Nearly seven years later, many states have successfully implemented NEDSS projects. However, there has been no systematic assessment of these projects to determine both the successes and potential barriers of the state-based NEDSS projects.

In August 2007, CSTE conducted a brief assessment of NEDSS project managers to identify successfully-implemented NEDSS projects, particularly those with features that might be of benefit in additional state and local health jurisdictions.

The goal of the assessment was to provide an overview of the NEDSS landscape at the national level.

In July 2007, CSTE's two workgroups, the NEDSS Base System (NBS) Subcommittee and the Public Health Informatics (PHI) Team, convened to develop the assessment tool. Both workgroups consisted of state and local epidemiologists and surveillance experts. All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, New York City, Los Angeles County, CA, Clark County, NV and American Samoa (N=56) participated in the assessment and resulted in a response rate of 100% completion. Data was analyzed using MS Excel 2003 and SAS version 9.1.3.

The NEDSS assessment depicts the landscape of electronic disease surveillance systems nationwide. The level of integration, either stand-alone or integrated systems, varies among electronic disease surveillance systems and status of development. Many systems under future development have integrated designs in an effort to move towards building monolithic disease surveillance systems.

The CSTE NEDSS assessment gives us an opportunity to evaluate the national landscape of electronic disease surveillance systems and identifies states that possess open-source code software. As more states move towards interoperability and as standards are developed, the ability to identify potential obstacles becomes paramount.