If a patient seeks healthcare in Utah, but resides in another state using AIMS for notifiable disease reporting, AIMS can also report to the patient’s home state, if RCKMS determines that the case meets that state’s reporting criteria.
“It relieves the burden on the providers to have to keep track of all the rules,” said Barnes. “RCKMS does the decision-making.”
The AIMS platform itself is infinitely scalable and fully compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Federal Information Security Modernization Act.
In addition to maintaining AIMS, APHL secures the legal agreements necessary to assure health agencies have legal access to notifiable disease data uploaded to AIMS. All of these activities support the Digital Bridge vision to “ensure our nation’s health through a bidirectional information flow between health care and public health.”
In Utah, Barnes’s team is now setting up reporting rules for hepatitis C and looking to entice additional large hospital groups to upgrade to the AIMS reporting system. “Having APHL facilitate the conversion among electronic health record vendors, hospitals and the health agency has been a big help for us,” he said. “APHL carries a lot of weight.”
Ultimately, the AIMS solution saves time for doctors and nurses, while providing more timely, complete and accurate data to inform public health activities such as foodborne disease investigations for salmonellosis or contact tracing for gonorrhea. It enables public health epidemiologists to spend more of their time investigating outbreaks and less time chasing down missing case information. The goal? To make data flow faster than diseases can spread.
Banner: The UDOH eICR/ELR Informatics team. Photo: UDOH
Top Left: A snippet from a demonstration electronic initial case report (eICR) message containing demographic information for a patient. Photo: UDOH