Development of Flexible Monitoring System for Diseases and Incidents

Abstract

Background: Over the past three years, Georgia has conducted active monitoring for either close contacts of highly infectious diseases or travelers from impacted areas of highly infectious diseases. Each disease or incident requires customization within the disease surveillance system to adequately complete active monitoring. The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) and the State Electronic Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (SendSS) team have extensive experience with development of active monitoring platforms for individual diseases but identified the need for a flexible application that could be initiated by epidemiology subject matter experts (SMEs) and rely less on IT developers’ time.

Methods: DPH has existing software development capacity supporting SendSS. SMEs identified essential components of an active monitoring system, then narrowed in on those sections that required customization. SMEs provided a section outline and customization options for each section to the SendSS developers. They created a user interface including SME-defined options in each customizable section.

Results: The following customizable sections were included in the general monitoring system: search, summary screen/dashboard, management of events, management of symptoms, and email set up. The general monitoring system provided state and district epidemiologist the ability to customize active monitoring based the following factors: duration of monitoring, cadence of monitoring, compatible symptoms, and email communications/notifications.

Conclusion: Overall, the flexible monitoring system gives the SME the ability to quickly develop an active monitoring platform that is customizable for their disease/incident. With this system, the SME can reduce the time required to set up and conduct active monitoring. The system streamlines Georgia’s active monitoring platforms into one general system which provides the capacity for the SME to set up the response and local epidemiology staff to view and monitor their residents. This critical work is performed without additional developer time.

Keywords

active monitoring, surveillance, highly infectious diseases, informatics

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Development of Flexible Monitoring System for Diseases and Incidents

Background: Over the past three years, Georgia has conducted active monitoring for either close contacts of highly infectious diseases or travelers from impacted areas of highly infectious diseases. Each disease or incident requires customization within the disease surveillance system to adequately complete active monitoring. The Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) and the State Electronic Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (SendSS) team have extensive experience with development of active monitoring platforms for individual diseases but identified the need for a flexible application that could be initiated by epidemiology subject matter experts (SMEs) and rely less on IT developers’ time.

Methods: DPH has existing software development capacity supporting SendSS. SMEs identified essential components of an active monitoring system, then narrowed in on those sections that required customization. SMEs provided a section outline and customization options for each section to the SendSS developers. They created a user interface including SME-defined options in each customizable section.

Results: The following customizable sections were included in the general monitoring system: search, summary screen/dashboard, management of events, management of symptoms, and email set up. The general monitoring system provided state and district epidemiologist the ability to customize active monitoring based the following factors: duration of monitoring, cadence of monitoring, compatible symptoms, and email communications/notifications.

Conclusion: Overall, the flexible monitoring system gives the SME the ability to quickly develop an active monitoring platform that is customizable for their disease/incident. With this system, the SME can reduce the time required to set up and conduct active monitoring. The system streamlines Georgia’s active monitoring platforms into one general system which provides the capacity for the SME to set up the response and local epidemiology staff to view and monitor their residents. This critical work is performed without additional developer time.