Nebraska epidemiology and laboratory capacity for prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases(ELC) - nebraska's epidemiology, laboratory, and capacity (ELC)-related programs are entirely…

Nebraska epidemiology and laboratory capacity for prevention and control of emerging infectious diseases(ELC) - nebraska's epidemiology, laboratory, and capacity (ELC)-related programs are entirely operated out of the dhhs division of public health. Epidemiology and informatics are tightly organized within our agency. Organizationally the units are CO-located: both on the organizational flow chart and geographically in terms of office locations within our building. We believe this set-up could be used as a model for integrating public health epidemiology and informatics. Critical to our integration is the cross training that has occurred over the past five years. Many of our epidemiologists have been either project lead or deeply involved in launching/leading our informatics initiatives. This includes electronic laboratory reporting, health alert network and syndromic surveillance. All of these initiatives were conceived and initiated by epidemiologists who had some past involvement in informatics. Much of the knowledge and depth accumulated by the epidemiology staff derived from their experiences in leading or assisting in these projects. Similarly, our work with the laboratory originated from a need experienced in the early 2000S: epidemiologists and laboratorians collaborated to build a system that shared laboratory orders and results stored in the university of nebraska medical center laboratory information system with the public health program/epidemiology staff that needs the laboratory information to perform their jobs. By 2003 epidemiology/laboratory had jointly developed a system for electronic laboratory reporting of laboratory tests from a sunquest laboratory information system at the university to our nedss base system, established at the state health department. We maintain a close collaboration in updates to our informatics processes with the laboratory, along with shared involvement in epidemiology/laboratory projects related to identifying pathogens of particular importance to public health. These include influenza, west nile virus, other arboviruses, toxigenic e coli including whole genome sequencing, and antibiotic resistance testing.