HLN provided project management and business analysis support to the International Society for Disease Surveillance Meaningful Use Workgroup as it developed syndromic surveillance standards and guidelines to be used by the Office of the Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) to clarify the public health surveillance requirements of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) Meaningful Use Programs. HLN staff facilitated the work of the group and produced three key deliverables: a preliminary set of Core EHR Requirements for Syndromic Surveillance; a final set of Core Business Model and EHR Requirements for Syndromic Surveillance; and significant contributions to CDC's PHIN Messaging Guide for Syndromic Surveillance.
For a large county government agency, HLN worked to improve the transactional and reporting capabilities of a countywide coordinated case management system, a web-based information system designed by intensive case managers and epidemiologists. HLN documented the system as it existed, developed specifications for incorporating future data sets into the design, and created a roadmap that the staff could follow to iteratively implement new data sets and reporting functionality into the existing system and a new data warehouse. HLN's design includes a new Extract, Transform and Load processes and data model to support all of the business intelligence needs of the agency.
HLN completed a detailed roadmap of the data exchange and information processing steps for the maintenance and support of a statewide childhood immunization information system. This analysis focused on the data file inputs and outputs of the system. HLN documented and evaluated the current processes after reviewing available documentation (more than 180 documents, including management reports, record layouts, database schematics, e-mail correspondence, UNIX shell programs, and SQL scripts) and conducting on-site interviews. Very little formal documentation existed aside from the actual program and batch file code. Recommendations for improvement were subsequently integrated into the agencies operations practices.