National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS)
The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) is an initiative that promotes the use of data and information system standards to advance the development of efficient, integrated, and interoperable surveillance systems at federal, state and local levels.
The mission of NEDSS was to design and implement seamless surveillance and information systems that take advantage of the best information and surveillance technology, and serve the following needs at the local, state, and national levels:
- Monitor and assess disease trends
- Guide prevention and intervention programs
- Inform public health policy and policy makers
- Identify issues needing public health research
- Provide information for community and program planning
- Protect confidentiality while providing information to those who need to know
NEDSS was designed to address the limitations of current surveillance systems which include:
- Multiple incompatible disease specific systems that currently exist
- Incomplete and delayed data
- Burden on health care system to report disease
- Overwhelming volume of data to be managed by health departments
- Lack of state-of-the-art information technology
The vision of NEDSS is to have integrated surveillance systems that can transfer appropriate public health, laboratory, and clinical data efficiently and securely over the Internet. NEDSS will revolutionize public health by gathering and analyzing information quickly and accurately. This will help to improve the nation's ability to identify and track emerging infectious diseases and potential bioterrorism attacks as well as to investigate outbreaks and monitor disease trends.
NEDSS will facilitate the collection of case report forms from providers in two important ways. First, standards are being developed to assure uniform data collection practices across the nation. The public health data model and common data standards will recommend, for example, a minimum set of demographic data that should be collected as part of the routine surveillance. In addition, guidelines will provide a consistent method for coding data on the data collection forms. It is expected that standardizing data collection forms should ease the burden on physicians and their staff by providing a more uniform data entry portal for all reportable conditions via secure web-based systems or, for larger organizations via electronic data exchange that is automatic and requires minimal burden on healthcare reporters.
Second, NEDSS will include recommended standards that can be used for the automatic electronic reporting of surveillance data. Specifically, NEDSS will recommend a standard data architecture and electronic data interchange format to allow computer systems to generate automatically electronic case reports that can be sent to local or State health departments. These types of standards would both ease the burden on large organizations that already have computerized data systems (such as regional laboratories, hospitals, managed care organizations) and would ensure that all cases that are in the provider's data systems are being reported to public health.
The NEDSS Base System is an example of a NEDSS compatible system that can be used by a state health department for the surveillance and analysis of notifiable diseases. The NEDSS Base System provides a platform upon which modules can be built to meet state and program area data needs as well as providing a secure, accurate and efficient way for collecting and processing data.
NEDSS system architecture was designed to integrate and replace several current CDC surveillance systems, including the National Electronic Telecommunications System for Surveillance (NETSS), the HIV/AIDS reporting system, the vaccine preventable diseases and systems for tuberculosis (TB) and infectious diseases.
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