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ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts

S&I Public Health Reporting Initiative: Improving
Standardization of Surveillance
Michael Coletta*1, Nikolay Lipskiy2, David Birnbaum3 and John Abellera2

1NACCHO, Washington, DC, USA; 2CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA; 3Washington State Department of Health, Olympia, WA, USA

Objective
The objective of this panel is to inform the ISDS community of

the progress made in the Standards & Interoperability (S&I) Frame-
work Public Health Reporting Initiative (PHRI). Also, it will provide
some context of how the initiative will likely affect biosurveillance
reporting in Meaningful Use Stage 3 and future harmonization of data
standards requirements for public health reporting.

Introduction
The S&I Framework is an Office of National Coordinator (ONC)

initiative designed to support individual working groups who focus
on a specific interoperability challenge. One of these working groups
within the S&I Framework is the PHRI, which is using the S&I
Framework as a platform for a community-led project focused on
simplifying public health reporting and ensuring EHR interoperabil-
ity with public health information systems. PHRI hopes to create a
new public health reporting objective for Meaningful Use Stage 3
that is broader than the current program-specific objectives and will
lay the ground work for all public health reporting in the future.  To
date, the initiative received over 30 descriptions of different types of
public health reporting that were then grouped into 5 domain cate-
gories. Each domain category was decomposed into component ele-
ments and commonalities were identified. The PHRI is now working
to reconstruct a single model of public health reporting through a con-
sensus process that will soon lead to a pilot demonstration of the most
ready reporting types. This panel will outline progress, challenges,
and next steps of the initiative as well as describe how the initiative
may affect a standard language for biosurveillance reporting.

Methods
Michael Coletta will provide an introduction and background of

the S&I PHRI. He will describe how the PHRI intends to impact re-
porting in a way that is universal and helpful to both HIT vendors
and public health programs.

Nikolay Lipskiy will provide an understanding of the ground
breaking nature of collaboration and harmonization that is occurring
across public health programs. He will describe the data harmoniza-
tion process, outcomes, and hopes for the future of this work.

David Birnbaum has been a very active member of PHRI and has
consistently advocated for the inclusion of Healthcare Associated In-
fections (HAI) reporting in Meaningful Use as a model. David has
been representing one of the largest user communities among those
farthest along toward automated uploading of data to public health
agencies. He will describe the opportunities and challenges of this
initiative from the perspective of a participant representing an already
highly evolved reporting system (CDC’s National Healthcare Safety
Network system). 

John Abellera has been the steward of the communicable disease
reporting user story for the PHRI. He will describe the current chal-
lenges to reporting and how the PHRI proposed changes could im-
prove communicable disease reporting efforts.

This will be followed by an open discussion with the audience in-
tended to elicit reactions regarding an eventual consolidation from
individual report specific specification documents to one core report
specification across public health reporting programs which is then
supplemented with both program specific specifications and a lim-
ited number of implementation specific specifications.

Results
Plan to engage audience: Have a prepared list of questions to pose

to the audience for reactions and discussion (to be supplied if partic-
ipation is low).

Keywords
Standards; Interoperability; Meaningful Use; Reporting; Stage 3

*Michael Coletta
E-mail: mcoletta@naccho.org

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 5(1):e100, 2013