PHASE 1: NEW FACILITY STEPS TO ENGAGE
Engage is the first of four onboarding phases for the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP). Onboarding is a collaborative process in which the NSSP and site teams work with a facility, health department, electronic health records (EHR) vendor, or health information exchange (HIE) to transmit syndromic data from medical record systems to the NSSP BioSense Platform.
The “STEPS TO ENGAGE” job aid will take the site administrator through the activities that must be completed by the site and feed administrator before connecting to the BioSense Platform. During the engage phase, sites will manage the list of onboarding facilities, placing highest priority on emergency departments and urgent care facilities. Sometimes the site administrator will oversee feed administrator tasks.
Job aids are available for planning and each phase of onboarding: Engage, Connect, Validate, and Operate. Use these job aids with each other and the New Facility Onboarding Guide for the BioSense Platform, hereafter referred to as Onboarding Guide.
| PHASE 1—NEW FACILITY STEPS TO ENGAGE | |
| SITE ADMINISTRATOR | FEED ADMINISTRATOR |
| STEP 1: Identify feed administrator (primary contact) for setting up facility connection. | STEP 1: Work with the site administrator to prepare for facility onboarding. |
| STEP 2: Engage with facility for onboarding. | STEP 2: Establish service-level agreements, as needed. |
| STEP 3: Establish service-level agreements with facilities, as needed. Examples include Facility BOPA and DUA. Site and facility BOPAs can be found in the Onboarding Guide. | STEP 3: Submit at least two test messages of each HL7 message type to the NIST validation tool. At a minimum, validate the following message types and confirm successful results.
Message types: |
| STEP 4: Review deadlines associated with grant, cooperative agreement, or other funding mechanism (if applicable). | STEP 4: Submit successful results to site administrator. |
| STEP 5: Review Planning: Site Support Model (Job Aid) to confirm support level needed during onboarding. | STEP 5: Review NIST HL7 validation results with site administrator |
| STEP 6: Update the site Master Facility Table (MFT). Set the status of the facility being onboarded to Onboarding. To add a new facility, see the BioSense Platform Quick Start Guide to Using the Master Facility Table, NSSP Technical Resource Center. | |
| STEP 7: Work with feed administrator to review NIST HL7 validation results for each facility that will be onboarded. | |
| STEP 8: To prepare for facility connection to the BioSense Platform, ask your feed administrator if HL7 data integration tools such as Rhapsody and Mirth are available. Both have SFTP capabilities and can be configured for data uploads. | |
Key
BOPA: BioSense Platform Onboarding Process Acknowledgment
DUA: Data Use Agreement
NIST: National Institute of Science and Technology
