Evaluation of knowledge resources for public health reporting logic: Implications for knowledge authoring and management

Abstract

To control disease, laboratories and providers are required to report conditions to public health authorities. Reporting logic is defined in a variety of resources, but there is no single resource available for reporters to access the list of reportable events and computable reporting logic for any jurisdiction. In order to develop evidence-based requirements for authoring such knowledge, we evaluated reporting logic in the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologist (CSTE) position statements to assess its readiness for automated systems and identify features that should be considered when designing an authoring interface; we evaluated codes in the Reportable Condition Mapping Tables (RCMT) relative to the nationally-defined reporting logic, and described the high level business processes and knowledge required to support laboratory-based public health reporting. We focused on logic for viral hepatitis. We found that CSTE tabular logic was unnecessarily complex (sufficient conditions superseded necessary and optional conditions) and was sometimes true for more than one reportable event: we uncovered major overlap in the logic between acute and chronic hepatitis B (52%), acute and Past and Present hepatitis C (90%). We found that the RCMT includes codes for all hepatitis criteria, but includes addition codes for tests not included in the criteria. The proportion of hepatitis variant-related codes included in RCMT that correspond to a criterion in the hepatitis-related position statements varied between hepatitis A (36%), acute hepatitis B (16%), chronic hepatitis B (64%), acute hepatitis C (96%), and past and present hepatitis C (96%). Public health epidemiologists have the need to communicate parameters other than just the name of a disease or organism that should be reported, such as the status and specimen sources. Existing knowledge resources should be integrated, harmonized and made computable. Our findings identified functionality that should be provided by future knowledge management systems to support epidemiologists as they communicate reporting rules for their jurisdiction.

The Centers of Excellence in Public Health Informatics: Improving Public Health through Innovation, Collaboration, Dissemination, and Translation

“…Staes et al present an evaluation and analysis of Reportable Condition Mapping Tables relative to nationally defined reporting logic and recommend “using knowledge management tools to author, verify, improve, and authenticate logic, and continually incorporate improved logic that has been validated in clinical systems” (5). Xu et al describe how their framework for collaboration leads to successful translation of their research into public health practice.…”

Developing a sampling method and preliminary taxonomy for classifying COVID-19 public health guidance for healthcare organizations and the general public

“…KM strategies applied to PH emphasize the importance of coherent processes to manage the entire knowledge curation and dissemination life cycle, including the identification of relevant evidence, asset creation, updating, storage, evidence synthesis, intervention and evaluation [11]; and the shortcomings of approaches that fail to carefully target guidance [1]. Initial research on KM in PH has focused on the translation of scientific findings into evidence-based guidelines for healthcare systems [12,13] and PH case reporting [14,15]. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of studies have also sought to characterize knowledge search and dissemination patterns by the general public [6,[16][17][18].…”