The US does not have a unified system for surveillance of violent deaths. This report describes the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS), a system for collecting data on all violent deaths (homicides, suicides, accidental firearms deaths, deaths of undetermined intent, and deaths from legal intervention, excluding legal executions) in participating states. The NVDRS centralizes data from many sources, providing a more comprehensive picture of violent deaths than would otherwise be available. The NVDRS collects data on victims, suspects, and circumstances related to the violent deaths. Currently, 17 US states participate in the NVDRS; the intention is for the NVDRS to become a truly national system, representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the US territories. This report describes the history of the NVDRS, provides an overview of how the NVDRS functions, and describes future directions.

Objective The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak progressed rapidly from a public health (PH) emergency of international concern (World Health Organization [WHO], 30 January 2020) to a pandemic (WHO, 11 March 2020). The declaration of a national emergency in the United States (13 March 2020) necessitated the addition and modification of terminology related to COVID-19 and development of the disease’s case definition. During this period, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and standard development organizations released guidance on data standards for reporting COVID-19 clinical encounters, laboratory results, cause-of-death certifications, and other surveillance processes for COVID-19 PH emergency operations. The CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository was created to address the need for PH and health-care stakeholders at local and national levels to easily obtain access to comprehensive and up-to-date information management resources. Materials and Methods We introduce the clinical and health-care informatics community to the CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository: a new, national COVID-19 information management tool. We provide a description of COVID-19 informatics resources, including data requirements for COVID-19 data reporting. Results We demonstrate the CDC COVID-19 Information Management Repository’s categorization and management of critical COVID-19 informatics documentation and standards. We also describe COVID-19 data exchange standards, forms, and specifications. Conclusions This information will be valuable to clinical and PH informaticians, epidemiologists, data analysts, standards developers and implementers, and information technology managers involved in the development of COVID-19 situational awareness and response reporting and analytics.

No abstract

ObjectiveThe objective of this panel is to inform the ISDS community of the progress made in the Standards & Interoperability (S&I) Framework 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. IntroductionThe 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 interoperability 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 categories. Each domain category was decomposed into component elements and commonalities were identified. The PHRI is now working to reconstruct a single model of public health reporting through a consensus 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. MethodsMichael Coletta will provide an introduction and background of the S&I PHRI. He will describe how the PHRI intends to impact reporting 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 harmonization 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 Infections (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 challenges to reporting and how the PHRI proposed changes could improve communicable disease reporting efforts. This will be followed by an open discussion with the audience intended to elicit reactions regarding an eventual ...

The objective of this presentation is to evaluate progress in the development of semantically interoperable content for public health (PH) systems that monitor PH threats. It was demonstrated that while progress towards content standardization for exchange of these data exists, there are some gaps that became evident through this study. Our results demonstrate that content standards for monitoring PH threats at a patient-level are better defined than at population level. Results of this study underline the importance of better coordination of data harmonization efforts between and within domains of PH knowledge.