Key Objectives:
Demonstrate the benefits of cooperation with other public health agencies in the use and development of open-source and free software.
Brief Summary:
The Southern Nevada Health District has been working in cooperation with other the States of Utah and Kansas since 2010 in developing and deploying free and open-source software solutions. The three jurisdictions have successfully shared code and tools with each other and assisted each other with projects such as legacy data migration. All three jurisdictions have consumed significantly increasing numbers of Electronic Lab Reports (ELRs) in recent years. We have been able to handle this constantly increasing message volume only because our improved tool set heavily automates the consumption of these messages. In addition to saving significant funds by not purchasing commercial software, the benefits of this cooperation have been enormous. Each jurisdiction has profited from work performed by the others and our current efforts at improving the toolset promise to yield benefits for years to come.