NBS Features and Benefits

NBS facilitates the adoption of national consensus standards used across public health and healthcare—including vocabulary standards such as LOINC, SNOMED, and RXNORM and messaging standards such as HL7—and helps local, state, and territorial public health departments use standards when sending information to CDC about notifiable diseases and conditions.

NBS Features

• a patient-centric model that allows all public health events for a patient to be viewed from one central location;
• role-based security by program area and jurisdiction;
• support for more than 140 different diseases and conditions, including hepatitis, general communicable diseases, vaccine-preventable diseases, meningitis, and tuberculosis;
• Page Builder module for design of data collection forms on the fly as surveillance needs change and new diseases of public health significance are identified;
• automated receipt of electronic laboratory reports (ELR)—19 out of 22 sites receive and process ELR in production;
• automated receipt of electronic case reports from healthcare providers, other health information systems, and other public health jurisdictions;
• user-customizable decision support functionality for automated processing of ELRs and electronically received public health case reports;
• workflows to support the surveillance and follow-up processes used during public health investigations;
• contact tracing;
• reporting module to extract data for analysis, visualization, and reporting;
• near real-time case reporting to CDC; and
• patient deduplication.

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Benefits of NBS

• reduction in communicable disease reporting time;
• increase in the number of laboratory reports received by public health;
• improved communication among local, state, and federal public health staff, delivering the right information to the right person at the right time;
• ability to push data entry back to the source to reduce reporting time and data transcription errors while improving data quality;
• reduction in paper-based reporting; and
• robust reporting module with flattened data marts.

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How NBS is Improving Public Health Outcomes

NBS has been helping to improve public health outcomes for more than a decade. Since the system was launched in 2003, the following has occurred:

• State and local public health agencies receive reportable disease information for investigation and follow-up more quickly; this may result in decreases in disease spread.
• Public health staff are able to manage information more efficiently, allowing more time for investigation and prevention activities.
• Standardized data are available to inform public health activities, identify disparities, and evaluate the effectiveness of public health programs.
• CDC has received more than 700,000 Nationally Notifiable Disease (NND) case notification electronic messages generated by jurisdictions using NBS, resulting in timely available data for CDC programs to use to make informed public health decisions.

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