The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is helping states launch the CDC Alerting Service (CDCAS), an automated, cross-jurisdictional system that will let states reliably broadcast public health alerts to thousands of public health officials.
CDC recently completed a CDCAS pilot project with Michigan and Indiana and the three are now working to fully install CDCAS. Another eight states are meeting with CDC to prepare for implementation. CDCAS is a component of CDC's nationwide Public Health Information Network.
“There’s a lot of interest within the states in implementing this,” said Robb Chapman, CDC program manager for PHIN Communication and Alerting. “And they’re very, very eager to get moving.”
The majority of public health alerts are now sent by a patchwork of systems and manual methods, which can be ineffective when large numbers of public health officials need to be contacted, CDC said.
CDCAS will provide a standard way to reliably and securely alert thousands of public health officials across jurisdictions of disease outbreaks, bioterrorism emergencies and other public health events, the agency said.
CDCAS helps ensure that the right public health officials get the right information as quickly as possible, said Chapman, who demonstrated the system at the Health Information Management and Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in late February.
The system, for example, is capable of sending alerts through a several communications methods, including e-mail, text messaging, cell phones, satellite phone, faxes and pagers, and will continue attempting to make contact using each recipient’s list of communications devices until the message is successfully delivered, CDC said.
Other features include role-based alerting, which saves public health organizations the headache of keeping track of or looking up the contact information of individual employees in other public health organizations.
The system also features a secure Web site where officials can view alerts and acknowledge their receipt, the ability to send audio messages, translate text into speech when necessary and the ability to require recipients to authenticate themselves before a sensitive alert is delivered, the agency said.
Chapman said in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the anthrax scares, CDC officials realized that they not only needed a system that was secure, reliable and fast but that would allow public health officials to “be accurate in terms of targeting messages and have a lot more assurance that the word will actually get through in the case of a dire emergency.”
Chapman noted that while the messages, which are also called CDC Cascade Alerts, can be sent system-to-system automatically, states have the autonomy to determine how they’re processed and who receives them. “The important thing is that we know that messages are able to get through, but in a way that still respects the jurisdictional boundaries of the different organizations,” Chapman said.
From the battlefield to the home front: Managing medical data
Government Health IT presents Col. Claude Hines Jr., program manager for the Defense Health Information Management System, in this recent InSight eSeminar. Col. Hines discusses the health information technology and tactical challenges faced by the military medical community in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of conflict. In doing so, he describes the current information technology solutions for transferring clinical data between battlefield care givers to health care personnel at military treatment facilities worldwide.
