Communicable Disease Prevention/Public Health Preparedness: HealthSentry

Heightened concerns about bioterrorism and newly emerging pathogens have forced public health organizations to re-evaluate the methods presently used to report diseases. Currently, most healthcare providers and laboratories notify public health by telephone, fax, or mail. Timeliness and completeness of reporting vary widely between reporting sites and can impair the ability to detect or respond to a large outbreak or bioterrorist event. Underreporting is another major concern with traditional disease surveillance strategies; even severe diseases can sometimes go unreported. In 2002, the Kansas City (Missouri) Health Department (KCHD) collaborated with Cerner Corporation to develop and implement an automated electronic communicable disease reporting system, known as HealthSentry™. This system captures laboratory and physician ordering information from 22 metropolitan area healthcare systems, standardizes the data, and delivers reports to KCHD daily. HealthSentry can also alert health department staff by pager if potential agents of bioterrorism have been found.

The goal of HealthSentry is to meet the challenge of linking public health organizations to reliable clinical data without burdensome manual data collection and reporting.more timely and accurate reporting.

A benefits analysis of the first six months of data found significant improvements in the timeliness and completeness of disease reports, compared to conventional reporting mechanisms. HealthSentry also identified areas of considerable underreporting. To date, more than two million patient encounters have been processed and filtered by HealthSentry for reportable disease analysis and trending.