Onboarding Outreach: Moving Data Into Production

Purpose

The NSSP onboarding team takes a collaborative approach to move facilities through the onboarding process—from Staging to Production—via the BioSense Platform. In this article, we describe the outreach that users can expect as they move through the process.

Graphic showing gears and lines to represent a technical process

Moving facilities through the onboarding process

Each month the NSSP onboarding team will contact site administrators to ask whether data being received in the Onboarding environment (used for staging) are ready for activation in the Production environment. This inquiry isn't intended to replace onboarding activities that sites are implementing. Instead, it's one of several steps in the collaborative approach that the onboarding team uses to move facilities through the onboarding process—from Staging to Production.

The onboarding team first checks whether facilities that actively send data to the Onboarding environment have data in XX_ST_Processed that meet minimum completeness requirements of 80% or greater across all Priority 1 data elements.

If completeness is good (above 80%), the onboarding team will ask site administrators if they are ready to advance these facilities to Active status in the Master Facility Table, provided the facilities can pass a validity review. (Sometimes site administrators have reasons for keeping facilities in an Onboarding status and decline to have these facilities reviewed further.)

If the site administrator responds "yes" and wants to move the facilities into Production, the onboarding team will:

  • Run full validation checks on all facilities based on site feedback and with site administrator approval.
  • Promote all successfully validated facilities to Active status in the Master Facility Table.
  • Follow up with site administrators to confirm all approved facilities' data feeds are moved to the Production environment.

Reach out for onboarding assistance‎

The NSSP onboarding team will work with your health department, facility, vendor for electronic health records (EHR), or heath information exchange (HIE) to transmit syndromic surveillance data from internal medical record systems to the NSSP Biosense Platform. If you represent an HIE, EHR vendor, or hospital and want to participate in the NSSP, please contact nssp@cdc.gov. If you're already an NSSP participant and need onboarding assistance, please contact the Service Desk.

Checking in with sites approved for Activation

Additionally, the onboarding team will contact site administrators whose facilities were recently approved for Activation but have not begun sending data to Production. For each approved facility, the onboarding team will request:

  • An update on activities required for moving facility data to the production feed.
  • An estimated time when the onboarding team should expect to see data arrive on production servers.

If you have questions about how to enlist the onboarding team's help in moving facility data from the Onboarding environment (used for staging) to the Production environment, please submit a ticket to the NSSP Service Desk (an account is required).