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The design and
functionality of this application meets the federal requirements of the Public
Health Information Network functions and specifications version 1.2, the public
health logical data model and the architectural elements of the National
Electronic Disease Surveillance System. MEDSIS is a HIPAA
compliant, statewide system hosted and supported by the Department for use by
local health departments for disease surveillance, and individuals
and institutions responsible for reporting communicable diseases.
Electronic Laboratory Reporting (ELR) from commercial clinical and hospital
laboratories will also be available through web entry or daily electronic
transmission of laboratory test and result information to MEDSIS, eliminating
paper reporting from
these laboratories. This information will be immediately available
to local health departments.
MEDSIS is integrated into
the SIREN (Secure Integrated Response Electronic Notification) System and
thus, will take advantage of SIREN alerting capabilities, secure email
communications, secure data messaging and translation services, the role-based
public health directory and the system's failover capacities. MEDSIS is under
development in partnership with our local health departments, to ensure local
disease surveillance and outbreak detection needs are met. For more
information on this application, please contact the Electronic Disease
Surveillance Program at (602) 364-3289.
Functionalities available in
this first release (MEDSIS 1.0) include:
- Entry of cases directly into system by county health departments,
infectioncontrol practitioners, and Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS)
- Immediate jurisdiction-specific viewing of reported or submitted cases
- Assignment of investigators and tracking of investigations by public health users
- Functionality to manage cases under investigation, including addition of disease specific risk information for nine enteric diseases
- Search for cases or patients
- Ability to share a view or transfer cases to another jurisdiction
- Ability to submit cases to ADHS
- Generation of reports
- Download extracts of jurisdiction-specific data for further analysis
Planned future enhancements
include:
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Migration
to the latest version of the public health logical data model
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Additional
functionalities:
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To track
historical addresses
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To
de-duplicate and merge public health cases
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To
automate case definitions
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Incorporation
of data edits and business rules
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Addition
of the remaining disease-specific observations
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Enhanced
reports and extracts
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Inclusion
of historical data
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Enhanced
integrated electronic laboratory reporting.
The system is housed in a
commercial data center served by two power grids, diesel generator and battery
cell back up, and 26 internet service providers, six running simultaneously.
The site has restricted access and structural security.
The application is written in .Net, using and array of redundant SQL
servers, integrated data repository and a storage area network.
With Microsoft Internet Explorer browser 5.5 or higher, user ID and
password, and signed user agreement various levels of access enable external and
internal partners to use the system.
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