CDC is making the effort to speed the process for correct information to get to health departments quickly to recognize disease outbreaks. The agency recently announced in their newest issue of “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) that getting the lab information to the right place at the right time is beginning to pay off.
In order to speed sending lab reports, labs must take part in the widespread adoption of Electronic Laboratory Reporting (ELR). So far, 10,400 labs send reportable data to health agencies. The MMWR shows that the number of state and local health departments that receive electronic reports from labs has more than doubled since 2005.
In the past year, the number of individual reports received electronically increased by 15 percent. States and local health departments now estimate that nearly two-thirds (62 percent) of the total lab reports were received electronically. The reports received through ELR varied by jurisdiction, types of labs reporting, and by the disease reported.
However, more work remains to be done to get more labs to report electronically and to increase the percentage of reports that are made electronically. The MMWR shows that today only about a quarter of the nation’s labs are reporting electronically.
It also is a fact, that electronic reporting for some diseases lags behind other diseases. For example, 76 percent of reportable lab results for general communicable diseases were sent using ELR as compared to 53 percent of HIV results, and 63 percent of results for sexually transmitted diseases.
Significant federal funding made available through the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is assisting providers and hospitals in using ELRs. Technology enables hospitals to further accelerate sending reports electronically and starting right, hospitals are required to use ELR in order to receive incentive payment.
Funding to help pay for epidemiologists, lab technicians, and health information systems staff is now being distributed through CDC’s Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity (ELC) cooperative agreement. Through this agreement, CDC provides funding to all 50 state health departments and six local health departments to enable electronic reporting.
According to Robert Pinner, M.D., Associate Director for Surveillance, Programs, and Informatics in CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases, “These systems are complex to implement and require substantial investment, but the ELR system will provide health departments the tools they need to quickly identify and respond to disease threats and be able to monitor disease trends now and in the future.”