Outbreak Detection & Automated Public Health Reporting

The nation’s public health system depends on hospitals, laboratories and physician offices as its front line for disease protection. Unfortunately, manual reporting to health authorities regarding disease outbreaks or potential bioterrorism events is often incomplete and slow. Automatic, electronic transmission of laboratory data can shorten the notification cycle and heighten awareness of a potential outbreak.

Cerner Corporation's HealthSentry® solution provides a proven early outbreak detection and reporting system. HealthSentry provides a secure, HIPAA- compliant connection between healthcare centers and public health organizations.  HealthSentry extracts data from laboratory systems and provides comprehensive reports with orders, results, patient and provider demographics for further investigation.

Cerner developed HealthSentry in 2002, piloting it with the Kansas City Health Department.  The Kansas City Health Department realized more complete data and a reduction in overall reporting time, as described in the study provided below and printed in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Key HealthSentry benefits:

• Provides early outbreak detection of communicable diseases (county, city and state levels)
• Automates public health reporting (reduces manual efforts, saving FTE time and expense)
• Provides advanced reporting logic (minimizes over-reporting and reduces under-reporting)
• Improves overall community security and response

HealthSentry flyer 

Biosurveillance Case Study 

“Public health organizations can only implement effective prevention and control measures to protect the public if they have the ability to continuously monitor events, rapidly identify an outbreak, effectively analyze the data, immediately alert authorities and have the necessary resources to respond,” Dr. Rex Archer, director of the Kansas City Health Department.

Related Articles:

Preventive Medicine, Modern Healthcare (.PDF)
Missouri To Adopt Disease Alert System,  Kansas City Star (.PDF)
Emerging Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control (.PDF)