199413 Improving situational awareness on a budget: Real experience integrating reportable disease and water-related events

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Timothy W. Ellis, MS , Emergint Technologies, Inc., Louisville, KY
Craig D. Stanley, BS, MCSD , Emergint Technologies, Inc., Louisville, KY
Situational awareness for many public health departments consists solely from the combined mental acuity of their staff. Authors will demonstrate a real-life example of a Public Health Information System tool set which simplifies both data collection and preliminary data analysis processes in order to place actionable data in the hands of Public Health professionals in support of enhanced situational awareness, decision-making, and mandated disease reporting. Authors have leveraged multiple integration approaches to support public health departments and water utilities via real-time situational awareness; these approaches have many additional uses for a wide variety of stakeholders. Authors will demonstrate software developed using open source components that provides syndromic and disease-specific surveillance using First Responder data, Healthcare Provider data, geospatial analysis and visualization, automated disease reporting, and two-way collaboration to support case investigations between Public Health and Healthcare Providers. Authors will also discuss the implementation agility of the integration options, the low-cost nature of the tools that can be leveraged, and the expansion possibilities of these approaches.

Learning Objectives:
1. By the end of the session, the participant will be able to identify at least three open source tools available for situational awareness decision support. 2. By the end of the session, the participant will be able to identify steps for leveraging disparate data streams in a coherent manner. 3. By the end of the session, the participant will be able to identify residual data use scenarios for existing data streams.

Keywords: Data/Surveillance, Health Information Systems

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am the systems and software architect for the deployed integrated solutions to be described
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.