BACKGROUND: The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) Modernization Initiative (NMI) is a CDC-wide initiative designed to enhance the system’s capabilities to provide more comprehensive, timely, and higher quality data than ever before for public health decision-making. Through NMI, HL7-based messages provide a single standard for the submission of case notifications from health departments to CDC. In December 2016, NMI celebrated a landmark achievement as the first health departments began to submit disease notifications using new NNDSS HL7-based case notifications for 59 conditions. Work in 2017 has built on this success with message mapping guides (MMGs) for new conditions, software enhancements to the Message Validation, Processing, and Provisioning System (MVPS) that will decrease the time to incorporate new conditions, and ongoing technical assistance to health departments to implement the messages.
METHODS: NMI takes advantage of advances in information technology, mass adoption of electronic health records, improved procedures for conducting surveillance, and the opportunity to improve links between healthcare and public health. It is a collaborative effort among the NMI team at CDC; CDC disease-specific programs; health departments that conduct reportable disease surveillance, investigate reported events, and submit case notifications to CDC; and our partners at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists and Association of Public Health Laboratories.
RESULTS: In addition to developing MMGs for additional conditions, the NMI team has used NMI’s third year to look at positioning NNDSS to receive data that have historically been sent in separate data streams, ensuring that case notification messages are robust enough for antimicrobial resistance findings, and incorporating data on current occupation and industry. Additional states have begun to transmit data, and MVPS has begun to process data for additional diseases.
CONCLUSIONS: NMI continues to build on the success seen in 2016 by incorporating technology and standards to make NNDSS data submission more integrated and efficient and by laying the groundwork for future innovation.