Developing and Evaluating a Prototype Communicable Disease Web-based Clinical Reporting Tool

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2019 ; Reporting reportable diseases within a timeframe is considered a cornerstone of any public health surveillance system. The purpose of surveillance is to empower decision makers to act by providing timely and accurate data. Conducting surveillance requires a cycle of collecting and reporting individual cases by solo healthcare providers or healthcare facilities to the local/public health department. Healthcare providers are familiar with the requirements to report reportable diseases, but compliance is a challenge. Novel influenza has been a reportable disease since the 2007 legislation. Pandemic influenza is caused by novel influenza that is introduced into a population where some of this population has low immunity to novel influenza, which increases the mortality rate. In the past 120 years, there have been six well-known international novel influenza spread. The deadliest novel influenza epidemic happened in 1918. That year the Spanish Influenza (H1N1) infected about 500 million people and caused the death of an estimated 20 – 50 million. Other novel infections similarly need to be reported and track. Two examples in the last five years are Middle East Respiratory virus and Zika virus. I developed a Web-based reporting tool prototype to help healthcare providers in reporting communicable diseases that are required to be tracked such as novel influenza cases to authorities based on the state’s official case report form. The overarching goal was to develop and evaluate this prototype. My aims were: 1) Understanding the problems within the reportable diseases reporting process from healthcare providers to healthcare authorities, 2) Develop and test a prototype Web-based reporting tool to help to improve the reporting process, and 3) Evaluating the prototype communicable disease Web-based clinical reporting tool. The result of Aim 1 was identifying gaps between states’ reporting guidelines and states’ case report forms at individual state level and across states. ...