Regional Data Sharing – International Society for Disease Surveillance

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Data sharing between jurisdictions is key to strengthening public health surveillance. To facilitate data sharing on a regional basis, ISDS convened a pilot Data Sharing Workshop in May 2013 with the support of ASTHO and CDC. This Workshop focused on emergency department data coming into BioSense 2.0, though data sharing was discussed broadly beyond the BioSense platform and tool. 

Workshop Goals:

This Workshop had 3 main goals:

  1. To establish positive working relationships and trust among peers, with the hope that it would nurture data sharing and learning and make joint analysis simpler; 
  2. To increase practitioner skills in syndromic surveillance; and
  3. To clarify data sharing issues and promote enhancements in BioSense 2.0.

Pilot Workshop Participants:

  • Public health practitioners from the state- and local- level in Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin
  • Staff from ASTHO, RTI, the BioSense Redesign Team, and ISDS

Workshop Activities:

  • Utilized BioSense and other tools to describe and analyze data from the summer of 2012, specifically looking at heat related illness 
  • Discussed benefits, barriers, and solutions to barriers in inter-jurisdictional data sharing

Notable Outcomes:

  • Increased knowledge and skills in syndromic surveillance
  • Improvements in inter-personal relationships that helped facilitate effective data sharing and communication between jurisdictions

Looking forward: The increases in knowledge, skills, abilities, and data sharing all indicate that this Workshop model is feasible, practical, and important for other regions. ISDS hopes to conduct similar Workshops soon in the United States.

If you have any additional questions about ISDS’s Data Sharing Workshop please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Workshop Artifacts

Workshop participants submitted a Letter to BioSense Governance reflecting their thoughts on BioSense’s functionalities. You can read the Letter here . 

For more information on this Pilot Workshop see the Final Report (to view the appendix see the embedded document below)