Programs

• Biosurveillance
• Communities of Practice
• Directory, Alerting, and Emergency Operations
• External Workforce Development
• Knowledge Management
• Laboratory Systems
• National Notifiable Disease Surveillance
• Outbreak Management
• PHIN Certification
• Vocabulary/Messaging Standards
• Global Public Health Informatics
  
  

Biosurveillance

The program focuses on:

• Data acquisition;
• Data analysis and reporting;
• Situational Awareness; and,
• Public Health Response.

Currently BioSense:

• Supports more than 800 registered users;
• Connects with 570+ hospitals;
• Receives an average of 175,000 near real-time messages per hour;
• Receives data from 1300+ Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals and healthcare facilities; and,
• Receives laboratory data from LabCorp and RelayHealth.

Communities of Practice

Fostering Collaboration & Innovation for PHIN: A PHIN Community of Practice (CoP) brings together members of the PHIN Community who have a common interest and common problems in a technical or functional area (domain) of PHIN. Members deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis (community) and collaborate to develop common and often innovative processes, practices, and tools (practice).

The PHIN Communities of Practice Program (CoPP) provides the leadership and resources to facilitate, communicate, educate, train, and support the PHIN CoPs within the PHIN Community and the associated PHIN Communities of Practice Council that provides guidance. The CoPP has been developed in response to public health partner requests that the PHIN community become more collaborative, with all PHIN partners having equal opportunities for shared decision making and shared development of the processes, tools, and practices that facilitate electronic information exchange within public health.

For more information, please visit the Communities of Practice website at http://www.cdc.gov/phin/communities/

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Directory, Alerting, and Emergency Operations

The Directory, Alerting, and Emergency Operations Program houses projects focused on communications between Public Health professionals and information sharing about urgent health events. It is made up of the following projects:

• CDC Alerting;
• Epi-X (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/epi-x.html);
• HAN (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/han.html); and,
• PHIN Directory (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/phindir.html).

External Workforce Development

The purpose of the External Workforce Development Program is to increase the public health informatics workforce. Through activities such as AMIA 10x10, Public Health Informatic Institute (PHII) workforce curriculum endeavor, and the PHIN Conference (http://www.cdc.gov/phinconference/), the program aims to ensure a skilled and competent public health workforce.

When fully formed and operational, this program will include projects focused on:

• Developing an informatics workforce pipeline through colleges and universities;
• Educating the existing public health workforce in core informatics competencies through a variety of mechanisms; and,
• Increasing the number of public health informaticians working in state and local public health.

Knowledge Management

The Knowledge Management Program, through science and practice, aims to connect people to people and people to the public health knowledge they need to work better, find data/information faster, and improve public health decision making.

Areas of focus include Collaboration, Content Management, Decision Support, Clearance, and Web Operations.

The Program is made up of the following NCPHI projects:

• CDC.gov Web Operations;
• Documentum;
• eClearance;
• NCPHI Web;
• Public Access; and,
• WONDER.

Laboratory Systems

The Laboratory Response Network (LRN) is a coordinated network of labs for which CDC provides the capability to test for biological and chemical terrorism agents. The charge was to create standard data exchange for the LRN where none existed before. To address this challenge the Program takes a two-fold approach:

• Fill immediate need using LRN Results Messenger (LRN RM); and,
• Work on long-term goals through LIMS Integration (LIMSi).

Projects in the Laboratory Systems Program include:

• ASTRO;
• LRN (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/lrn/index.html);
• PHLIP; and,
• STARRS/LUNA (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/luna.html).

National Notifiable Disease Surveillance

The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) is a state-based public health surveillance system for conditions designated by the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) as nationally notifiable. Each week, provisional data sent by states and territories are error-checked, verified, aggregated, and published in tabular and graphical format in the MMWR. The NNDSS data also undergo an end-of-year data reconciliation and verification process and are published as finalized data in the MMWR Summary of Notifiable Diseases, United States. Weekly provisional NNDSS data are shared with CDC programs having prevention and control responsibility for specific nationally notifiable diseases. Finalized data are re-released to CDC programs and the public, under the terms of the NNDSS data release agreement, which was negotiated with CSTE in June 1996. For CDC programs, the NNDSS Link is a tool developed to query data within the NNDSS. This tool includes an aberration detection module and ad hoc query functionality.

Components include:

• PHIN Case Notification Messaging Guides and specifications;
• NEDSS Base System (NBS);
• NEDSS Messaging Solution;
• Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity Cooperative Agreement;
• Provision of COTS products to support disease surveillance (integration engine, patient de-duplication, geocoding);
• Supports the Nationally Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) – case notification;
• Electronic Laboratory Results (ELR) Reporting and Case Reporting;
• A user community for the NBS and NMS; and,
• NEDSS Operational Workgroup.

Outbreak Management

The Outbreak Management Program is made up of activities focused on dealing with outbreaks and enabling public health workers to manage the situation. It supports the CDC community health protection preparedness goal of “People prepared for emerging health threats,” and the Congressional Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 that established an integrated national system in support of terrorism response and prevention.

Projects in the Outbreak Management Program include:

• Countermeasure Inventory Tracking (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/cit/index.html);
• Countermeasure Response Administration (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/cra/index.html);
• Epi Info; and,
• Outbreak Management System.

PHIN Certification

The PHIN Certification Program verifies that state and local public health departments have the capability to electronically exchange public health data across jurisdictional lines based on national standards of interoperability and data exchange. The PHIN Certification process uses program specific requirements for the evaluation of message structure and content, as well as security and data integrity. The two documents that govern the PHIN Certification process are PHIN Requirements v2.0 and PHIN Certification Process v1.0. Meeting PHIN Certification is currently a requirement of CDC’s Public Health Emergency Preparedness (PHEP) Cooperative Agreement, which funds 62 jurisdictions.

Components of this program include the following:

• Development and maintenance of PHIN Requirements (providing national standards for electronic exchange of public health data);
• Development and maintenance of PHIN Certification Criteria (measuring compliance of state and local partners in meeting PHIN Requirements);
• Refining of PHIN Data Exchange Standards (PHIN Message Mapping Guides) development and implementation processes within NCPHI and across CDC);
• Programmatic partnerships within CDC;
• Technical Assistance to 62 Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreement Grantees (state and local partners) to achieve PHIN Requirements; and,
• Objective assessment of 62 Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreement Grantees (state and local partners) ability to meet PHIN Certification Criteria.

Vocabulary/Messaging Standards

PHIN Vocabulary Standards is a key component in supporting the development and deployment of standards-based public health information systems. PHIN Vocabulary Services seeks to promote the use of standards-based vocabulary within PHIN systems and foster the use and exchange of consistent information among public health partners. The use of PHIN Vocabulary Standards ensures that vocabularies are aligned with PHIN standards and with appropriate industry and Consolidated Health Informatics Initiative (CHI) vocabulary standards. These standards are supported by the PHIN Vocabulary Access and Distribution System (VADS) for accessing, searching, and distributing standards-based vocabularies used within PHIN to local, state and national PHIN partners. It promotes the use of standards-based vocabulary within PHIN systems to support the exchange of consistent information among Public Health Partners.

Projects include:

• Controlled Health Thesaurus;
• Data Message Brokering;
• PHIN VADs (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/phinvads/index.html); and,
• PHIN MS (http://www.cdc.gov/phin/activities/applications-services/phinms/index.html).

Global Public Health Informatics

The United States has national security interests in preserving the health of its population, livestock, crops, and natural resources. It is also engaged in health improvements and system strengthening activities (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] is one example) around the globe. These require in today’s increasingly interconnected and threatened world where diseases know no borders detection and response capacities of countries, international cooperation, and the sharing of reliable public health information among countries. These efforts are, however, hampered by the lack of optimal global informatics strategies, architecture, and standards; information system integration, and interoperability; and duplication of efforts/resources. In response, NCPHI established a Global Public Health Informatics Program (GPHIP) to contribute to CDC’s global goals and ensure CDC’s global support, partnership and alignment in informatics. GPHIP has the following key functions:

GPHIP has the following key functions:

• Coordinates NCPHI’s global informatics efforts;
• Serve as a secretariat for CDC’s global public health informatics efforts; and,
• Serve as a secretariat and administrator for a proposed WHO Collaborating Center for Public Health Informatics.

The GPHIP is situated within the Office of the Director of NCPHI and will have CDC Advisory Board and Technical Working Groups and WHO-CDC Charter to accomplish its functions.

GPHIP areas of work include:

• Contributing to a CDC global informatics team supported by roster of external experts;
• Supporting the development of global partnerships, strategies, frameworks, and standards;
• Providing informatics support to the implementation of the International Health Regulations;
• Providing country or sub-country level health information system development support;
• Supporting the development of a global public health grid and interoperable epidemiologic tools;
• Developing and applying appropriate informatics solutions catered to specific settings and situations;
• Contributing to global informatics capacity development;
• Providing country or sub-country level health information system development support; and,
• Enhancing the science of informatics through global scientific forums.