Posted on

Seamless Transition

The Public Health Division of the Wyoming Department of Health was faced with several challenges with their existing NEDSS Base System (NBS) implementation. These included the need to modernize their electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) architecture to respond to the demands of Meaningful Use and expand their surveillance capacity by using a up-to-date system implementation. After selecting InductiveHealth’s NBS hosting and support offering, within two weeks the Wyoming Department of Health’s NBS implementation was transitioned to InductiveHealth’s secure private cloud environment and fully upgraded and operational. This included a full round of testing with the new release and migrated historical data, along with transitioning of all of the Wyoming Department of Health’s existing ELR feeds. All of this was accomplished with nearly zero downtime for end-users.

Since then, InductiveHealth has dramatically increased ELR onboarding into Wyoming’s NBS implementation utilizing our Engage, Connect, Validate, Operate onboarding methodology. The result is more high-quality data available to epidemiologists with up-to-date system features and enhanced support.

“We are very happy with our partnership with InductiveHealth.  In just a few months they’ve made significant strides on-boarding laboratories for electronic lab reporting.  We are so excited about the progress and look forward to continuing our partnership.” – Clay Van Houten, Wyoming Department of Health

Posted on

Delivering GIS Capabilities

Since John Snow’s original map charting London Cholera cases, geographic analysis of data has been a core capability for the practice of public health.  Geographic analysis has, however, been a gap in the standard functionality in the CDC’s NEDSS Base System (NBS), requiring jurisdictions to manage their own external processes for exporting and analyzing NBS surveillance information in geospatial tools.  This time-intensive and error-prone process limits the effectiveness of geospatial analysis for data collected by the NBS.

InductiveHealth was engaged earlier this year by the District of Columbia Department of Health to solve this problem to enable rapid geo-analysis and mapping of public health surveillance data.  This has involved an automated integration with the District’s centralized ArcGIS and Google Maps installations, providing automated geo-coding of NBS case information and an integrated geographic mapping view for cases managed by the DC NBS instance.  This week InductiveHealth completed the Implementation Phase for our main deliverables for this contract and we hope to demonstrate these new capabilities to the broader NBS community in the near future.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in this area!

 

 

 

Posted on

Clearing the Release Log Jam

With the majority of states using a version of the NBS that is almost a year old, InductiveHealth’s Director of Professional Services, Stephen Macauley, recently sat down for a Q & A on how states can clear the release log jam.

How would you describe the NBS release landscape?

Complicated. With the release of 4.4.1 in January, most NBS states are now faced with sun setting Sun One Directory Server (4.4.1), the retirement of eWebIT(4.4), and upgrading of Operating Systems and Relational Databases (4.4.1). Simultaneously, states are having to respond to attestation requests for Meaningful Use, onboard reference laboratories, and participate in other state and federal initiatives.

Why do we have a release log jam?

Each recent release of the NBS impacts a critical part of the NBS architecture — 4.4.1 changes how user profiles are stored along with changing to a 64 Bit architecture whereas 4.4 changes how ELRs are consumed into the NBS. These releases are also cumulative in nature so you cannot move to 4.4.1 without first addressing the retirement of eWebIT. States have every reason to move slowly given problems encountered with these releases can render the NBS unusable. If even for just a few days, it would be catastrophic for a state to not process electronic laboratory reports.

Everyone has to remember that upgrading the NBS is not the primary job duty of state resources involved in the NEDSS initiative. These resources have to focus on their day jobs of monitoring and improving the health of their citizens.

What advice do you have for states in moving forward?

Simple — build and document a state specific release roadmap. Specifically, define the state’s capacity to implement major releases, determine the order of implementation based on business value, and determine what will happen when things go wrong. No state’s implementation plan will be the same, but each state should have a plan. Given the complexity of the NBS and the high cost to remediate data, plan for the worse and hope for the best.

Inversely, what should states not do to clear the log jam?

Rush. If your end users are satisfied with the current version of the NBS, why rush into something that may upset them. Remember, within each state only one or two technical administrators know the nuts and bolts of the NBS. However, hundreds of end users know they rely on the NBS every day to perform their job duties.

How can InductiveHealth help?

Our capabilities serve as accelerators for states clearing the release log jam. For example, our free trial offering provides states with a safe environment to evaluate new releases before even bringing them into their own environments. This a huge time saver thereby reducing the overall cost of implementing a new release.

Continue the dialogue with Stephen at [email protected].