The Military Health System and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are collaborating on a project through which CDC uses data from military sick calls to track outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Atlanta-based CDC, told an MHS conference in Washington recently that such data is critical in tracking seasonal influenza and other diseases.
“At our operations center, we are able to track seasonal flu because we have access to DOD information,” she said. “We take individual patient-level information and convert it into population-level information.”
CDC receives records on individual clinic visits every four hours via File Transfer Protocol.
MHS medical treatment facilities feed Standard Ambulatory Data Records (SADRs) into MHS’s data repository run by the Executive Information/Decision Support (EIDS) program office, where the records are processed to eliminate any individually identifiable information.
CDC has embedded software packages known as export utilities on the data nodes of EIDS’ architecture, which transform raw SADR data into a form acceptable for delivery by CDC.
MHS’ data repository is considered a Sensitive Unclassified System and is protected with access controls.
“By aggregating the DOD records into population-level data, we are able to develop a situational awareness of infectious disease outbreaks,” said Gerberding. “We monitor this on a geospatial basis, and this allows us to be more sensitive to events and to respond to them earlier.”
Gerberding described the information-sharing project as a wonderful model of collaboration.
“These two entities have much more in common than most people realize,” she added. “By leveraging this information, we have created a whole that is greater than them sum of its parts. We are serving Americans and people around the world with information and tools to help with a broad range of health threats.”
Government Health IT presents Rick Friedman, director of the division of state systems for the Center for Medicaid and State Operations with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in this recent eSeminar regarding how the federal Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services is partnering with state Medicaid and health and human services officials to bring Medicaid into the digital age. Paul McCloskey, Government Health IT editor, moderates.
