BACKGROUND: Ensuring population health in a community requires surveillance and timely public health response to health threats. To meet this need, clinical and laboratory organizations are required to report selected conditions to public health authorities. To automate reporting, jurisdictional reporting requirements must be communicated in a manner understood by electronic health record (EHR) systems. The Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) collaborative project provides this jurisdictional knowledge to enable public health reporting.
METHODS: RCKMS project activities include but are not limited to: requirements definition; authoring tool development; knowledge creation, validation and curation; pilot implementations; collaboration with a wide variety of entities and other projects (e.g., Public Health Community Platform, Digital Bridge); public communication including webinars and conference presentations/demonstrations; community review via focus groups and workshops; and training sessions. RCKMS will be in production in time to support the Meaningful Use Stage 3 public health case reporting objective.
RESULTS: The time is now: STLT public health jurisdictions must determine their path to use of RCKMS. This presentation will consider some of the critical decisions that face public health entities. All jurisdictions must:
- Analyze how the laws/rules/policies in their jurisdiction impact their use of RCKMS; based on that analysis, determine whether or not their jurisdiction can use RCKMS
- Decide whether their jurisdiction will use RCKMS to support ELR, eCR or both; for each, determine whether RCKMS will be used only to provide information to reporters in human readable and machine-readable form, or also to provide centralized automated decision support
- Determine when their jurisdiction can begin use of RCKMS
- Ensure that appropriate staff are trained, and that resources will be available for the amount of time that will be required, both for initial creation of the knowledge in RCKMS and for its maintenance
- Author and maintain jurisdictional reporting criteria in RCKMS
- Determine how jurisdictional reporting criteria not supported in the initial release of RCKMS will be addressed (e.g., epidemiologic criteria, complex clinical criteria)
- Establish appropriate relationships between RCKMS and other/existing methods of presenting jurisdictional reporting criteria
- Develop and implement a plan for communicating to reporters in their jurisdiction changes in reporting processes associated with the use of RCKMS
CONCLUSIONS: As production implementation of RCKMS draws near, STLT public health agencies must actively confront a wide range of issues, from policy to operations.