Layout 1 ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 111 (page number not for citation purposes) ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts Evaluating the Variation on Public Health’s Perceived Field Need of Communicable Disease Reports Uzay Kirbiyik*1, 3, Roland Gamache2, 3, Brian E. Dixon2, 3 and Shaun Grannis1, 3 1Indiana University, School of Medicine, Indianapolis, IN, USA; 2Indiana University, School of Informatics, Indianapolis, IN, USA; 3Health Informatics, Regenstrief Institute, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, USA Objective To assess communicable disease report fields required by public health practitioners and evaluate the variation in the perceived utility of these fields. Introduction Communicable disease surveillance is a core Public Health func- tion. Many diseases must be reported to state and federal agencies (1). To manage and adjudicate such cases, public health stakeholders gather various data elements. Since cases are identified in various healthcare settings, not all information sought by public health is available (2) resulting in varied field completeness, which affects the measured and perceived data quality. To better understand this vari- ation, we evaluated public health practitioners’ perceived value of these fields to initiate or complete communicable disease reports. Methods We chose four diseases: Histoplasmosis, acute hepatitis B, hepati- tis C and salmonella. We asked public health practitioners from Mar- ion County Health Department (MCHD) of Indianapolis to list the fields they felt were necessary when submitting a communicable dis- ease report. We then asked them to evaluate those fields using the following criteria: Required – A critical case attribute, when missing or unknown, would make the task of initiating and/or closing a case impossible or exceedingly difficult. Desired – A case attribute allowing more complete epidemiologic profiles to be developed but, if missing, would not prohibit initiating and/or closing a case. Not applicable – A case attribute that is not usually collected to initiate and/or close a case for the particular condition. To quantify the need for the fields, we assigned a number to each response as follows: 0 - Not applicable 1 - Desired 2- Required We summed the numbers for each field for each disease and cre- ated a table for the perceived need of that field (table 1). Results The perceived needs table showed a difference between the fields needed to initiate or close a case. Moreover the perceived need for fields varied by disease as well. To assess the difference in perceived needs, we calculated the standard deviation of the fields (table 2). Conclusions Data quality is essential, not only for research but to support rou- tine public health practice as well. Many factors affect data quality; one of them is perceived need of the information by Public Health Practitioners. Despite working with public health stakeholders from the same organization we observed variation in their perceived needs for these fields to initiate or close a communicable case. These re- sults highlight another source of the problem regarding health infor- mation quality and its goodness of fit issues. Table 1. Perceived need for the selected communicable disease reports fields. Higher numbers (darker color) reflect greater perceived need. Table 2. Standard deviation of perceived need values for each field. Higher numbers reflect more disagreement among responses. ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 112 (page number not for citation purposes) ISDS 2012 Conference Abstracts Keywords completeness; Data quality; Communicable disease reports Acknowledgments We thank the MCHD of Indianapolis for their help with this research. References 1. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) June 1, 2012 / 59(53);1-111 http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ mm59 53a1.htm 2. Indiana Confidential Report of Communicable Diseases - State Form 43823 (R2/11-96) https://forms.in.gov/Download.aspx?id=5082 3. Wang R Y, Strong D M, Guarascio L M. Beyond accuracy: what data quality means to data consumers. Journal of Management Informa- tion Systems 1996; 12 (4); 5–33. *Uzay Kirbiyik E-mail: ukirbiyi@iupui.edu