Sharing Electronic Health Information from Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) Deployed Federal Health and Medical Field Teams during Public Health Responses: A State/Federal Partnership

BACKGROUND:   Ensuring that state and local health departments have access to the most up-to-date information from the field during a public health response is critical to maintaining situational awareness and facilitating effective decision-making.  Organizing and aggregating patient encounter information, especially from federal assets such as Disaster Medical Assistance Teams deployed to support a state’s emergency response activities, poses great challenges.  Often the patient data collection from deployed federal assets is conducted independently from the state’s routine procedures and is shared via static situation reports provided to state/local health departments.  In this presentation, we describe a state/federal data sharing partnership that provides a framework for rapidly sharing electronic health information from patients treated by deployed federal assets to state/local health departments during planned events, such as training exercises and national special security events, and public health emergencies. 

METHODS:   During the 2012 Republican National Convention, the Florida Department of Health (FL-DOH) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Emergency Response (ASPR) tested and established a data sharing procedure that passed deidentified patient health information electronically from deployed federal assets to FL-DOH’s syndromic surveillance system (ESSENCE-FL), where it was viewed and analyzed by FL-DOH public health practitioners. This successful data sharing pilot was expanded and formalized in 2014 to provide a framework for information sharing in response to any public health emergency at FL-DOH’s request. 

RESULTS:   Information shared from deployed federal assets includes the date and time of the patient medical encounter, the age, gender, and resident zip code of the patient, where they were treated in the field, whether or not they were a federal or local responder, their chief complaint/diagnosis, and their discharge information.  The data is updated every fifteen minutes and is accessible within ESSENSE-FL, allowing FL-DOH near real-time access to line-level data and query tools for rapid summary and analysis.    

CONCLUSIONS:   The current data-sharing framework between ASPR and FL-DOH presents one collaborative model between the federal government and state/local health departments designed to facilitate sharing of critical health information during planned events, such as training exercises and national special security events, and public health emergencies.  Expanding this framework to other interested state and local health departments will be a step toward ensuring effective, informed public health responses.