Electronic Sentinel Surveillance of Influenza-like Illness. Experience from a pilot study in New Zealand.

BACKGROUND: Electronic reporting of Influenza-like illness (eILI) from primary care was implemented and evaluated in three general medical practices in New Zealand during May to September 2015. OBJECTIVE: To measure the uptake of eILI and to identify the system's strength and limitations. METHODS: Analysis of transactional data from the eILI system; comparative study of influenza-like illness cases reported using manual methods and eILI; questionnaire administered to clinical and operational stakeholders. RESULTS: Over the study period 66% of total ILI cases were reported using eILI. Reporting timeliness improved significantly compared to manual reporting with an average of 24 minutes from submission by the clinician to processing in the national database. Users found the system to be user-friendly. CONCLUSION: eILI assists clinicians to report ILI cases to public health authorities within a stipulated time period and is associated with faster, more reliable and improved information transfer.

Development of an Electronic Notification System for Influenza-Like Illness Sentinel Surveillance.

An electronic Influenza like Illness surveillance system developed to support general practices to electronically notify the cases of influenza like illness (ILI) for national sentinel surveillance in New Zealand. Content analysis was performed to capture the information necessary for ILI surveillance. An online form was implemented within the patient management system to record the details of ILI cases. A middleware framework was developed to manage the information flow between GPs and national influenza surveillance coordinators. The framework used an HL7 version 2.4 messaging standard to receive the notification data and Rhapsody integration engines to parse the message and store the information in national ILI data base. This paper presents the system design and implementation details of electronic ILI notification system. It presents data model designed to capture information for ILI case along with the HL7 messages structure implemented in the system.

HL7 Middleware Framework for Laboratory Notifications for Notifiable Diseases.

LabSurv is an electronic notification system developed to support laboratories to directly notify the results of notifiable disease testing to public health services in New Zealand. A direct laboratory notification middleware framework was developed to manage the information flow between laboratories and public health services. The framework uses an HL7 messaging standard to receive the laboratory results and windows services to integrate the results with the cases of notifiable diseases within a national electronic surveillance system. This paper presents the system design and implementation details of direct laboratory notification system in LabSurv. It presents the HL7 messages structure implemented in the system. Finally, the performance of the system based on implemented framework is analysed and presented to evaluate the efficiency of our design.