Public Health Community Platform Proof of Concept Using the APHL AIMS Hub

BACKGROUND:  Laboratories generate an every increasing amount of information, which must be reported using third parties using various messaging standards. Requirements like these place an increasing burden upon laboratories and their limited IT resources. Decision support represents an important tool that can help public health collect, analyze and manage this information from a single or multiple sources. 

METHODS:  The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) designed the Public Health Community Platform (PHCP) as a cloud-based exchange where public health and healthcare are able to develop, compare and exchange interoperable solutions and allow access to common data sets upon which all types of analyses can be performed. The APHL Informatics Messaging Services (AIMS) platform meets many of the PHCP's goals and was chosen for a Proof of Concept project to demonstrate the utility of the PHCP framework. The APHL AIMS team was charged with designing, developing and testing an Electronic Laboratory Reporting (ELR) message processing application. This application uses an integration engine, the Reportable Conditions Mapping Table (RCMT), and a set of business rules to test an incoming ELR message to determine if it is “notifiable”. If so, a message is sent to both the sender and the receiver notifying them as to need of matching this message to a case.

RESULTS:  The APHL’s AIMS Platform generated real time alerts triggered by the identification of reportable laboratory results in incoming laboratory reports. This basic decision support functionality can be enhanced and extended to many other use cases in Public Health, Environmental and Agricultural laboratories. The proof of concept demonstrates the potential for decision support tooling and advanced interoperability solutions.

CONCLUSIONS:  The benefits of a PHCP like the AIMS hub are many fold. By sharing resources and experienced vocabulary and messaging support, the development times and costs are reduced. Laboratories large and small gain access to the latest interoperability solutions and can eliminate gaps between programs. The AIMS platform also allows partner laboratories to easily share solutions.