Public Health Reporting Initiative

The following is a message from John Stinn regarding the ONC Standards and Interoperability (S&I) Framework Public Health Reporting Initiative. Find a summary of the background of this project here. You may also find guidelines on how to submit a candidate user story for the public health reporting initiative here.

Public Health Reporting Initiative Participants -

How might reporting to public health agencies be performed efficiently from electronic health records (EHRs)—whether for newborn screening, infectious diseases or medical device adverse events? Can reporting requirements be made more consistent across public health programs and jurisdictions? Would this yield faster, more complete and more reusable information at lower costs to both report senders and receivers? These are some of the questions that the Public Health Reporting Initiative seeks to answer. Organized under the Standards and Interoperability Framework of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, the goal is to standardize and simplify how healthcare providers electronically submit mandated reports to health departments.

In 2012 the initiative will collect all User Stories (public health reporting scenarios from different public health programs) and seek to harmonize the data elements, standards, and reporting mechanisms. We will prioritize for the most standards ready User Stories into a single standards-based implementation guide in 2012, which can be iteratively expanded over the following years.  This could then be tested, and considered for national implementation, if successful.

Between now and November 18, we invite you to submit one or more User Stories you’d like considered, using  the guidelines found here, for group consideration.  We seek User Stories that focus on the initial report from a healthcare provider EHR to a local, state or federal public health agency.  Initiative participants will review your User Story for inclusion into the first such Implementation Guide. Anyone may submit a User Story, and anyone may participate in the process that follows by participating in the Wiki discussions.

Examples of the types of User Stories to be considered include:

·         birth registration (birth certificate),

·         newborn hearing screening (hearing screening test results report),

·         reporting a healthcare-acquired infection

·         reporting a drug or vaccine adverse effect

·         newborn metabolic screening (newborn screening laboratory test results reports),

·         an initial infectious disease report (including non-laboratory information)

·         an immunization (immunization administration report)

·         a cancer or other chronic disease registry report  

Your submission must be received by 11/18/2011.  If you’d like to submit a user story, simply submit the story to John Stinn (jstinn@cdc.gov) or Lindsay Oweida (loweida@cdc.gov), and we will post to the Public Health Reporting wiki. 

Thank you,

John Stinn

Public Health Reporting Initiative Support Lead