[ Music ]
Hello. I'm Chesley Richards, CDC's Deputy Director
for Public Health Scientific Services and welcome
to another installment of Conversations
on Public Health Surveillance.
Today I'm joined by Lesliann Helmus.
Lesliann, welcome.
>> Thank you, Dr. Richards.
>> Lesliann, what do you do here at CDC?
>> I'm the program manager
for the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.
This is a collaboration that extends all the way
from local public health and even the physicians
in the community up to the World Health Organization.
The physicians and laboratorians in hospitals, when they diagnose
or become aware of an important health event notify the public
health department and then those local health departments take
action to control disease.
That information is shared with the state
where they do broader assessments
and they forward the data to CDC.
At the national level, we make sure that data is delivered
to the programs who work with those diseases
and they use the data to make decisions about how
to allocate resources,
to evaluate whether effective approaches are being used
to control disease,
and to understand the disease across the country.
And where there are events of international concern,
CDC acts to initiate the transmission of that data to WHO
so the other countries can also respond.
>> Wow. Sounds very important.
How did you get interested in surveillance?
>> Well, I tell you, I've done almost all of my career
in public health doing surveillance.
When I was a student working on my master's degree
in epidemiology, I got a summer job
with the state public health department in Ohio and I started
out doing cancer surveillance
and cancer cluster investigations.
It was really intriguing and since then I--
you know, in my career in public health,
I've worked on occupational diseases and injuries,
done surveillance of infectious diseases,
and even done some syndromic surveillance, which is one
of the newer strategies we're using.
>> Wow, what a broad career in surveillance.
I understand that you're leading an effort here
at CDC called the Notifiable Disease
Modernization Initiative.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
>> Yeah. We recognize that a lot
of notifiable diseases reporting has really not evolved
with the technology over time and we want to try
to use informatics
and information technology to do the job better.
So, often local health departments have
to send the data on the same cases to multiple places at CDC
and we'd like to streamline that.
We're trying to use data standards to help do that.
We also recognize that when the data gets here to CDC,
the programs need timely, accurate, and complete data
and we want to make sure
that the data is getting to them effectively.
We've also got old ancient systems
that are processing this data and we'd like to retire those.
>> Yeah, that sounds terrific.
What do you think some
of the biggest challenges are in surveillance?
>> Well, you know, we are really working to, as I said,
incorporate the technology.
In particular, we're using the kinds of standards
that health care uses for messaging
and then also for coding the data.
So, we're using standardized codes.
We're developing message mapping guides
that instruct the health departments how
to send that data to CDC.
We're building new systems here--
really new one big system to process that data and then
to provision to the programs and try to make sure it's
in new databases for them.
We've got three approaches we're taking to that.
The first involves developing the specifications
for the message.
The second one focuses on that processing system.
The third one is technical assistance to the jurisdictions
so that they can do this packaging
and introduce new technology that they need to use.
>> That sounds fantastic.
So, those are challenges, but it sounds
like these present opportunities for the future.
What do you think the big opportunities are?
>> Well, I think there are two things
that are really important to us.
One is that the data that we're sending now--
and we've set up these messages--
it takes a long time and we're working really carefully
with the programs to identify data elements,
but it's pretty cumbersome.
I hope that in the future we'll have things well enough defined
that when there's a public health emergency we can quickly
tell the jurisdictions this is the data that's needed
and they'll know how to send the demographics and how
to send treatment information and how to send symptoms
so we can much more quickly establish that transmission.
The other thing we want to work
on is how we present the NNDSS data on the web
because right now our presentation is based
on the old paper format that we use for MMWR
and we think we can make it a lot more interactive
and a lot more useful to people.
>> That's terrific.
It sounds like really you're building this state-of-the-art
surveillance system for the future.
>> I think we are.
>> Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us today and thank you
for joining us on this installment of Conversations
on Public Health Surveillance.