Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 04/03/06 issue

North Carolina puts out a net for tracking diseases

System relies on formats that were developed by CDC to transmit, track statewide data

By Wilson P. Dizard III, GCN Staff

When Hurricane Katrina evacuees reached North Carolina last year, public health officials tracked the resulting surge in emergency room visits via a standards-driven statewide biosurveillance network.

“Katrina evacuees were using the emergency rooms for prescription refills and diabetes management,” said Dr. Anna Waller, principal investigator on the NC-DETECT project and a research associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s emergency medicine department.

The project, also known as the North Carolina Disease Event Tracking and Epidemiological Collection Tool, is an example of the kind of biosurveillance system that the federal Health and Human Services Department is looking for as part of its early use of health IT.

NC-DETECT is the syndromic surveillance arm of the state’s Public Health Information Network. It’s designed to be the canary in the coal mine, providing early alerts of public health problems to providers and health care planners.

Its development underscores some of the challenges health officials face, such as inconsistent data formats in emergency rooms and disparate systems within hospitals. But it also is a model of progress.

“Utilizing NC-DETECT following hurricanes hitting North Carolina is timely and efficient compared to the emergency department paper log review and abstraction used in the past,” Waller said at a Health Information Management Systems Society meeting.

North Carolina public health professionals have used NC-DETECT to track the state’s flu season. It can provide information on occupational health risks. And it is designed to detect bioterrorism and events such as a potential avian flu outbreak.

NC-DETECT includes data collected by the North Carolina Hospital Association in accord with a state mandate requiring hospitals to transmit selected emergency department data elements to the state at least daily.

The system is the primary statewide repository for emergency department data, funneling data into the statewide Public Health Information Network.

NC-DETECT relies on several standards incorporated in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s network architecture for health IT systems, known as the Public Health Information Network.

Messaging system

In many cases, the system uses hospital data formatted into the Health Level 7 messaging system standard. However, as a messaging system, HL7 was not designed to transmit comprehensive medical data, according to Waller.

For example, not every data element captured in the hospital systems is available in the HL7 standard.

More news on related topics: Health IT, Management, IT Management, State & Local



GCN Popup