Emerging Infection Program Web Service

Project Results: To view the PowerPoint presentation from CHIIC's May 2015 meeting, Click here.

Project Status: Completed

Point of Contact: Jason Hall

Center: NCEZID

Keywords: Shared Service, Web Service, Surveillance, Secure Transport, Interoperability

Project Description: The Emerging Infections Programs (EIP) is a population-based network covering 15% of the population and consists of projects to improve patient outcomes through evaluation and improvement of emerging infection prevention and control methods. EIP is a collaboration of CDC, state health departments, universities, hospitals, and other federal agencies.

Our proposed project is a major enhancement to the existing secure web service (EIP WS) pilot. The enhancement will provide a standards-based, configurable, re-useable and secure interoperable solution to support timely and effective system interaction between the CDC and public health partners for EIP and other surveillance activities.
The current EIP WS supports only supports a single EIP program and was designed as a proof of concept. As such, it is minimally extensible. We will employ innovation project resources to enhance the existing secure web service (EIP WS) pilot to enable the addition of new and future partner data interfaces through configuration of business rules and metadata rather than extensive coding and software development.
Initially adding support for a second EIP program to receive secure electronic surveillance information, the proposed enhancement to the web service framework will support future data interfaces by means of simple configuration changes, facilitating interoperability and reuse among CDC, its C/I/O’s and partners.

This project aligns and supports key strategic EIP information technology goals:

• Improve and modernize current EIP information technology, and
• Adapt and transform infectious disease public health practice to the new ways health care information is and will be exchanged, including the expanded use of electronic health care records, utilizing other existing or novel sources of electronic information for EIP work

These goals further align with the CDC surveillance strategy goal of accelerating the utilization of emerging tools and approaches to improve the interoperability, availability, quality and/or timeliness of surveillance data.

This proposed solution could also be reusable by other C/I/O’s by promoting this solution as CDC Shared Services, with appropriate resources to NCEZID for additional support personnel and expansion to more scalable server configurations. The initial project proposes to change the existing pilot framework and service to support a second EIP program to receive secure electronic surveillance information at the CDC and by doing so provide support for new and future partner data interfaces through configuration of business rules and metadata instead of software development.

Impact of project – The success of this project will provide a foundation for receiving secure and timely system-to-system surveillance information and other information formats, such as text, .CSV or flat files. The EIP WS will adhere to all required Security Assessment and Authorization (SA&A) process, formally known as C&A, and obtain the "authority to operate" in production, certifying it meets regulations defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

promoted as among the CDC Shared Services given the availability of funding and resources. Additionally, the configurable design of the solution will enable re-use/re-hosted by other C/I/Os, even if additional funding were unavailable.

Methodology - The EIP WS pilot is a standards-based web interface used to support interactions between the MuGSI case detection system (CDS) and Case Management System (CMS) applications. The next generation of EIP WS will support a new set of CDS and CMS surveillance applications and implement a framework for expanding the web service to provide EIPs support for additional surveillance information and formats . Currently most EIP programs receive their surveillance data monthly via uploads of MS Access or Excel files to SFTP sites and/or CDC hosted surveillance applications. This is neither timely nor efficient and can be improved greatly by enabling the configuration of new partner interfaces through the configuration of business rules and metadata stored in the database rather than extensive software coding. In this manner, the enhanced framework can achieve its goal of facilitating the evolving data transport needs of multiple surveillance programs.
Measure of Success – The project will be considered a success if two or more EIP surveillance programs use the Web Service, demonstrating its ability to be configurable to support new data interfaces for additional CDC programs.

For more information about this project, please contact the CHIIC at chiic@cdc.gov or Brian Lee at brian.lee@cdc.hhs.gov.