Piloting EHR-Based Chronic Disease Surveillance in Washington State

In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD) to pilot a surveillance project using EHR data modeled after an earlier project in Massachusetts. During the recent SHIEC conference, public health officials from Washington State described their experience piloting MENDS (Multi-state EHR-based Network for Disease Surveillance).

MENDS leverages an open-source platform called Electronic medical record Support for Public health (ESP) to extract, analyze, and transmit data from providers to public health agencies to support data analysis and decision-making. ESP runs in the healthcare provider’s data center and generates secure electronic reports for approved data users. It is designed to be compatible with any EHR system, NACDD says.