Many state and territorial birth defects programs need guidance to increase their informatics knowledge to implement interoperable birth defects surveillance (BDS) systems that lead to enhanced individual and population health.
In collaboration with CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), PHII is working with public health jurisdictions to strengthen the capacity of existing BDS programs to respond to emerging threats to mothers and babies. This increased capacity results from helping programs improve timeliness of surveillance data, leverage electronic health records (EHRs) and interoperability capabilities to enhance BDS, and use the surveillance data to improve health outcomes of affected populations.
This toolkit is designed to provide guidance to BDS program staff in defining and documenting system requirements and needs for updating and enhancing your BDS systems. It outlines a structured framework for requirements gathering specific to BDS programs and offers established guidelines for system update and development.
This guide outlines key questions and considerations for jurisdictions as you navigate the process of readiness assessment, piloting, and production deployment for electronic case reporting (eCR) in BDS. Users of this guide, including BDS program managers, can decide if eCR is right for the birth defects program based on available resources, partner engagement, and specific data needs.
This checklist, taken from the BDS Planning and Requirements Gathering Toolkit, is designed to help a program as you go through the requirements gathering process.
This assessment helps BDS determine your readiness for automated electronic data exchange using health information standards. It provides an approach for program staff to assess, identify and discuss information needs with internal and external partners. Participating in this assessment will give program staff a clearer understanding of success factors and the agency’s current capabilities.
These talking points should help public health professionals communicate with your leadership and colleagues on why interoperability is important to BDS programs.
This report provides an overview of experiences and lessons learned from the initial implementations of electronic case reporting (eCR) for BDS across three states. It highlights the successes and challenges encountered as these states worked to develop, pilot and implement eCR and offers guidance for other programs planning similar initiatives.
Webinar series
PHII and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have produced a webinar series that includes:
More webinars
Note: These materials were developed in support of Cooperative Agreement number 6-NU38OT000316, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Resource contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the CDC or the Department of Health and Human Services.
For questions about Birth Defects Surveillance (BDS) resources on this page, please contact us.
PHII is a program of The Task Force for Global Health, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that was founded as The Task Force for Child Survival in 1984. The Task Force is affiliated with Emory University.