County Health Officials Demonstrate Award-Winning Communicable Disease Reporting System

What: The Los Angeles County Health Department of Health Services (DHS) will hold a news briefing to demonstrate its award-winning electronic reporting system for communicable disease: "Visual Confidential Morbidity Report (CMR)." This innovative system, which was developed with private software company Atlas Development Corporation, has dramatically improved the health department's ability to manage disease and outbreak investigations by allowing laboratories to report disease electronically and hospital infection control practitioners to report via the Internet. The National Association of Counties (NACo) has awarded a 2003 NACo Achievement Award to the county health department for the Visual CMR system.

Why: Creating this technological infrastructure to handle the reporting of more than 80 diseases and conditions (e.g. foodborne illnesses or sexually transmitted diseases) that are mandated by law to be reported to the health department, increases the health department's capacity to handle other emerging public health threats such as SARS or West Nile Virus.

Health department officials will give a brief demonstration of the system and provide an example of how a public health worker would use the system for disease tracking.

When:
Tuesday, July 15 at 9:00 a.m. PST

Where:
Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration Room 830
500 West Temple St./downtown Los Angeles

Who:
Zev Yaroslavsky, Supervisor, Third District
Don Knabe, Supervisor, Fourth District
Thomas L. Garthwaite, MD, DHS Director and Chief Medical Officer
James Haughton, MD, MPH, Medical Director of Public Health
Robert Atlas, CEO, Atlas Development Corporation
Ann Vannier, MD, Director of Microbiology, Southern California Kaiser Permanente Regional Reference Laboratories