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

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.