Electronic Laboratory Reporting Technical Assistance

To further advance the implementation of ELR nationally, we partner with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to offer technical assistance to public health agencies and laboratories. Technical assistance engagements bolster capacity and provide sustainable, streamlined solutions to laboratories and agencies—ultimately reducing the burden of reporting on both the sender and receiver.

ELR technical assistance is typically jurisdiction-driven, with requests focusing on critical needs such as vocabulary and mapping, integration support and identifying opportunities to more seamlessly exchange data within and between states. In addition to supporting public health laboratories and agencies, we also provide support to commercial laboratories to satisfy their mandated reporting to public health.

These large-scale implementation efforts promote further standardization and high-quality data within ELR pipelines, allowing public health to receive critical information faster.

As an expansion of earlier ELR initiatives, we partner with CDC’s Division of Cancer Prevention and Control to standardize electronic cancer reporting from private pathology laboratories to public health agencies and central cancer registries. APHL provides technical assistance to onboard, validate and transmit pathology reports to the appropriate authority, ensuring timely and accurate data to inform analysis of cancer morbidity nationally.

InterPartner Data Exchange is an interstate-style message file naming format that allows for sending and receiving messages between any two trading partners on the AIMS platform. This filename structure is fixed, rigid and ensures validation. The first InterPartner message transfer was completed in November 2019 and within the first year, almost 7.5 million InterPartner files passed through AIMS.

As part of an overall mission to increase AIMS trading partners’ self-reliance, this message format was designed to allow a trading partner to add additional use cases once they have been initiated by AIMS support the first time. This means that AIMS trading partners are able to exchange data with virtually any other AIMS trading partner, regardless of the sender’s or receiver’s transport mechanism.

The InterPartner filename is a great way to simplify sending and receiving files with AIMS. Trading Partners should find that their number of connections within AIMS will decrease, which should save money and time.

Learn more about InterPartner Data Exchange

APHL supports CDC, state and local public health agencies, and public health, agriculture, veterinary and contract laboratories to establish surveillance of rabies in animals to inform disease emergence and spread. The project hones ELR surveillance work and explores cloud-based processing approaches and storage via AIMS to allow secure, direct connection from CDC program areas. Technical assistance is offered to laboratories to assist with data extracts, integration broker work, vocabulary mapping, message creation and message transport. Specifically, the project designs and implements approaches related to animal rabies surveillance including:

• Documentation of ELR data requirements for animal rabies using the HL7 2.5.1 constrained profile
• Identification of message structure to be used, constrained for non-human subjects
• Examination of options for streamlining data sent to CDC for non-human surveillance, including transport and message structure
• Design and implement processing and storage of received data, including evaluation of cloud options
• Implementation of HL7 ELR for animal rabies at reporting laboratories through APHL technical assistance
• Evaluation of web mapping and analysis options in use at CDC