One key to quickly containing a disease outbreak is quickly knowing that the illness is present in the community in the first place, and this year, Mesa County Public Health is rolling out a tool that will do just that.
Outbreak reporting as a tool is nothing new, said epidemiologist supervisor Kathleen Satterfield. Health departments have long worked to gather data about illnesses that might be spreading in schools, daycares or other group settings. The challenge is that information traveled slowly and across multiple avenues.
“In the past, when it's been a phone call or an email or they're coming to us from a state health department report, it's been a few days and so they've had quite a bit of disease spread by the time we talk to (those affected),” Satterfield said.
After chatting with health officials in other counties who had had success with online reporting tools, Satterfield and Mesa County Public Health started discussing a way to standardize and expedite the reporting process. Rather than relying on phone calls, emails or word of mouth to spread the news, Satterfield wanted an online tool that could quickly get the information that childcare providers were seeing on the ground directly to health officials who could act on it.
That effort fell to Gary De Young, a data architect at the health department. Mesa County has had plenty of experience to draw from when it comes to outbreak monitoring. In 2019, norovirus forced the closure of every school in Mesa County Valley School District 51. Just last year, the county had to corral a measles outbreak. Beyond those cases are the annual flu and respiratory cases that can go from routine to concerning in a period of weeks.
“The thorniest part is making (the tool) sufficiently flexible for the situations that you simply don't know about in the future,” De Young said. “So to make a tool that will do the things that we're currently doing but also anticipating things that, hey, we want to collect a little bit of different information for this next disease, how do we build that into the system?”
The online portal was first launched to child care providers. In the future, it will be rolled out to schools and residential facilities. It allows someone at a daycare to log on and answer a series of questions about what’s happening and to how many people. That information can then go to the county and officials can react as needed. In just over a week, three reports had already been filed by childcare providers in the county.
“Even with the three reports we've had thus far, it sped it up quite a bit. Gary built it so that it notifies us via email as soon as a childcare provider submits their form,” Satterfield said, “therefore, there's many sets of eyes on it, and we can respond quicker and provide guidance to whatever facility.”
That in turn allows county health officials to limit outbreaks before they make their way from the daycare to other aspects of the community.
“The faster that we can provide them with information and understand why and how the outbreak is spreading, the faster we can get people back to work, school and childcare and limit those disruptions,” Satterfield.
De Young said the tool is built in such a way that it can be expanded or altered as county staff sees new uses for the data. It’s also possible that, in time, the county will have enough data to compare the new reporting system to the old one as far as progress made on limiting outbreaks.
“It could very well be that beforehand, before we had the tool, it would take a couple days (to identify an outbreak), and then it narrowed it down to half a day, perhaps. And when you're dealing with something live, like the spread of a disease, two days is too long, a week is way too long,” De Young said.
