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, public health jurisdictions use the HL7 data exchange standard to submit NNDSS case notifications to CDC. In late 2016, CDC received HL7 case notifications using message mapping guides (MMGs) for Generic v2, Hepatitis, and Arboviral v1.3. Sending NMI HL7 case notification messages is a required activity for public health jurisdictions under the Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity cooperative agreement, Health Information Systems Capacity section. CDC provides technical assistance to jurisdictions to onboard and send NMI HL7 case notification messages through cooperative agreements with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) and through the CDC National Electronic Disease Surveillance System Base System (NBS) team.
METHODS: CDC works with CSTE, APHL, and NBS to provide technical assistance to public health jurisdictions to onboard and send NNDSS HL7 case notification messages by using CDC-developed MMGs. Throughout the message implementation and onboarding process, public health jurisdictions provide valuable feedback and lessons learned that can be used to guide the development of case notifications and identify potential issues to improve the NMI onboarding process.
RESULTS: This presentation will provide a broad overview of and lessons learned from the onboarding process for public health jurisdictions sending NNDSS HL7 case notifications to CDC. In addition, success stories and best practices learned from NMI pilot jurisdictions will be shared.
CONCLUSIONS: Providing public health jurisdictions with the lessons learned through NMI technical assistance and onboarding will increase the technical knowledge they need to efficiently implement and onboard NNDSS HL7 case notification messages.