PHASE 2: NEW FACILITY STEPS TO CONNECT

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Connect is the second 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 “CONNECT” job aid will guide the site administrator through activities once the facility has connected to the production environment and is ready for routine operation. 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. These job aids are intended to be used with each other and the New Facility Onboarding Guide for the BioSense Platform to onboard facilities.

PHASE 2—STEPS TO CONNECT ARROW
PHASE 2—NEW FACILITY STEPS TO CONNECT
PHASE 2—NEW FACILITY STEPS TO CONNECT
SITE ADMINISTRATOR

STEP 1: Confirm desired upload technology if new feed connection needs to be established. These are acceptable methods to connect to NSSP:

  • SFTP (preferred)
  • PHINMS (only for public health agencies and facilities with PHINMS installations that currently send data to and receive data from CDC or other PHINMS partner)

When choosing between SFTP and PHINMS, consider the following:

  • Is local support available?
  • Is permission required to install SFTP or PHINMS?
  • Will firewall rules be affected?
  • SFTP: Outbound port 22
  • PHINMS: Outbound port 443

If you are setting up a connection through an HIE or another non-standard method, the connection method could be different. Please work with your onboarding team for assistance.

STEP 2: Work with feed administrator to set up the connection. For help, contact the NSSP Service Desk. Select one of the following methods:

  • Set up facility connection to existing site SFTP feed using SSH key pair for feed authentication.
  • Request PHINMS authentication via NSSP Service Desk.
  • Request new-feed setup and SSH key pair for feed authentication via NSSP Service Desk.

STEP 3: Configure your SFTP or PHINMS feed.

  • Commonly used third-party SFTP tools include:

Work with the NSSP onboarding team to set up feed account and establish connectivity to the staging environment

Work with the NSSP onboarding team to configure feed connection.

STEP 4: Through your established feed, connect to the onboarding environment.

Step 4
Upload Path /<site_name>/<feed_name>/incoming/
Server Name stage-collect.syndromicsurveillance.org
IP Address 96.127.42.102
SFTP Port 22

 

STEP 5: If you are connecting through a new feed for the first time, once connected to onboarding environment, test connectivity by uploading a “hello world” test message to upload directory of your feed and confirm receipt.

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