NNDSS Supports the Monkeypox Response

NNDSS's role in the 2022 monkeypox outbreak response

The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) supported our nation's response to the 2022 U.S. monkeypox outbreak. Along with our partners in state, local, and territorial public health departments and disease programs at CDC, our team worked to ensure data about cases of monkeypox across the nation were received, processed, and sent to the disease experts at CDC. These experts used the information to track potential cases, respond to the outbreak, and improve national surveillance.

Here are some of the things NNDSS did behind the scenes to provide comprehensive, timely, and high-quality data for public health decision making:

• Led efforts to secure and maintain required approvals to receive monkeypox case data from public health departments in compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act.
• Partnered with the CDC monkeypox response to develop audience-appropriate messages to inform public health departments and partners, including the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) and the Association of Public Health Laboratories, about the latest monkeypox surveillance resources
  • developed content for NNDSS communication channels including Case Surveillance News, eSHARE webinars, and e-mail distributions to surveillance leads in state and local public health agencies.
  • leveraged existing relationships with health departments' informatics and disease surveillance experts to further increase the reach of monkeypox case surveillance messages.
• Collaborated with CDC's monkeypox response team to incorporate case notification data in NNDSS to the Data Collation and Integration for Public Health Event Response platform (DCIPHER) for data augmentation and monkeypox-specific data collection.

Key successes

• Optimized how CDC data systems pulled and processed data from CDC's monkeypox case surveillance databases; reduced daily processing time from nearly 1.5 hours to a little over 10 minutes.
• Developed a new monkeypox event code (11801) to help public health departments track and manage case data within their data systems and notify CDC of cases of monkeypox. Event codes are used by local, state, and federal surveillance information systems to help simplify storage and retrieval of information about cases of national notifiable or state reportable diseases or conditions.
• Worked with CDC's monkeypox disease experts and CSTE to coordinate the implementation of a national surveillance case definition for monkeypox. A surveillance case definition is a set of uniform criteria used by public health to classify and count cases consistently across the country.
• Updated the Message Validation, Processing, and Provisioning System (MVPS) to receive daily monkeypox surveillance updates from state, local, and territorial public health departments. MVPS received and processed the new data, sent these data to CDC disease experts and the CDC Emergency Operations Center for use in national monkeypox surveillance and the CDC monkeypox outbreak response, and published weekly and annual data on CDC WONDER and CDC.gov.
• In support of CDC's Data Modernization Initiative, NNDSS continued to look for ways to modernize our tools, technology, and strategies and to improve the quality and timeliness of surveillance data. The modernization of public health data and IT systems was central to the nation's efforts to respond to the monkeypox outbreak and strengthen preparedness for future public health threats.