Disease Surveillance System

Business Situation

This Texas county communicable disease and epidemiology team monitors county-wide diseases and outbreaks across school districts. Through school nurses, Syndromic data is captured and analyzed by the local health department. Budget cuts and productivity demands require a new Disease Surveillance System to:

• Improve efficiency of disease surveillance by providing school nurses with the ability to quickly enter data in a web-based solution.
• Ensure high security levels for surveillance forms with routine back-ups.
• Develop tools to assist epidemiologists monitor disease trends and assist investigators to identify those at greatest risk.

Solution

After evaluating the market and comparing existing products that monitor disease, the local health department chose a Vitasys web-based solution and provided all county school district nurses with system access. The security provided by a cloud solution, along with a guaranteed service level agreement allows the department to have significantly improved disease surveillance. 

Results

Local health department upgraded from .pdf’s, paper-based records and a limited system to a cloud-based solution built on the SQL Server platform. System developed and deployed within a three-month timeframe. Customer enjoys many benefits:

• Helps nurses quickly communicate health event spikes and other information to the health department.
• Cloud-based solution enables better collaboration between the school districts and the health department.
• Improves collaboration and communication amongst public health staff members and other health professionals.
• Supports multi-user access and form archiving for historical continuity.
• Significantly reduces labor costs and provide a high ROI through digitized work flows and advanced reporting.