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!