Division of Notifiable Diseases & Healthcare Information

DNDHI Overview

Advancing Public Health Surveillance Through Science and Collaboration

DNDHI’s key activities include the following:

• working with CDC programs, state and local health departments, and other partners to provide a regional and national public health surveillance picture for all hazards and health outcomes;
• developing and supporting development of syndromic surveillance data standards to help states implement the national initiative for meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs);
• maintaining an annual list of nationally notifiable conditions and case definitions based on Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Position Statements; and
• producing the weekly notifiable diseases and mortality tables and annual Summary of Notifiable Diseases for the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

BioSense

BioSense tracks health problems in the United States as they evolve. It provides public health officials with the data, information, and tools needed to better prepare for and coordinate responses to safeguard and improve the health of Americans.

BioSense 2.0 launched in November 2011. It is a collaborative syndromic surveillance system that integrates local- and state-level health data to provide local, state, and federal partners and CDC programs a near real-time nationwide all-hazards picture. This latest version of BioSense is the result of an interactive partnership within the public health community led by CDC.

This collaborative data exchange system allows users to track health issues as they evolve. BioSense is the only public health tool that provides a picture of what is happening right now with any health condition, anywhere and everywhere in the country.

BioSense 2.0 pulls together information on emergency department visits and hospitalizations from multiple sources, including the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, more than 100 hospitals that currently report directly to CDC from around the country, and state or local health departments that have agreed to share data from their own emergency department monitoring systems. Analysis of these data provides insight into the health of communities and the country. Such data are vital to guide decision making and actions by public health agencies at local, regional, and national levels.

NNDSS

To support public health programs, the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System focuses on aggregated individual case reports of nationally notifiable infectious diseases and conditions.

State, local, territorial, and tribal health departments notify CDC of cases of specific diseases and conditions that they identify in their jurisdictions. Every year, the nation’s epidemiologists determine which of these diseases and conditions should be notifiable and how to define a case.

The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS), a supporting component of NNDSS, improves the nation’s ability to identify, monitor, and investigate diseases and conditions by helping connect the healthcare system to public health departments and those health departments to CDC. NEDSS helps connect public health by developing data standards and providing financial and technical resources to state, tribal, territorial, and local health departments.

Activities of the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System include the following:

• NNDSS focuses on monitoring infectious disease morbidity for state and territorial reportable diseases designated as nationally notifiable.
• NNDSS aggregates data from 57 state, territorial, and local reporting jurisdictions each week.
• NNDSS data are shared with the general public through MMWR weekly provisional tables and annual Summary of Notifiable Diseases in the U.S. and with CDC programs through NNDSS Link.
• For notifiable diseases reporting, all states use a disease reporting system that is compatible with NEDSS.

DNDHI’s key accomplishments include the following:

• BioSense 2.0 launched in November 2011, making it the first Department of Health and Human Services system to move completely to a secure, cost-effective, full-feature cloud computing environment.
  • With BioSense 2.0, state and local health departments have technology that helps them keep up with the latest advances in electronic health records.
  • BioSense 2.0 saves health departments time and money by simplifying data collection, storage, and sharing.
  • BioSense 2.0 improves surveillance and situation awareness by strengthening cross-jurisdictional collaboration and data sharing.
• The BioSense program worked with partners to develop EHR requirements for syndromic surveillance.
• NNDSS has helped state and local health departments build a national network to support notifiable diseases surveillance since fiscal year (FY) 2000. NNDSS supports public health jobs in states.
  • In FY2011, NNDSS supported more than 100 staff in state and local public health departments.
  • In FY2012, NNDSS provided $10.4 million to 63 state, territorial, tribal, and local public health departments to support personnel and technology through the CDC Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity program.

DNDHI’s future plans include the following:

• The BioSense program will work with new state, local, and territorial health departments to help them join the BioSense 2.0 community of users.
• The BioSense program will increase financial support to state and local jurisdictions.
• NNDSS will improve data quality and access by launching a new data warehouse architecture.

• State, local, and territorial public health departments
• Other programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• International Society for Disease Surveillance
• Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists
• Association of State and Territorial Health Officials
• National Association of County and City Health Officials
• Joint Public Health Informatics Taskforce
• Public Health Informatics Institute
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Defense