Potential effects of electronic laboratory reporting on improving timeliness of infectious disease notification--Florida, 2002-2006.

Electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) potentially can improve the timeliness of notifiable disease case reporting and subsequent disease control activities, but the extent of this improvement and the resulting effects on the workload of state or local surveillance teams are unknown. To estimate those effects, investigators from the Florida Department of Health (FDOH) evaluated the timeliness of reporting for four notifiable diseases of varying incubation periods: salmonellosis, shigellosis, meningococcal disease, and hepatitis A. Investigators then calculated the potential improvement expected with ELR using the assumption that ELR can reduce to 1 day the time from completion of a diagnostic laboratory test to notification of the county health department (CHD) of the result. This report summarizes the results of that analysis, which showed that ELR would reduce the total time from symptom onset to CHD notification of a case by nearly half for salmonellosis (from 12 days to 7 days) and shigellosis (from 10 days to 6 days), but would produce no change for meningococcal disease (4 days) and minimal improvement for hepatitis A (from 13 days to 10 days). In Florida, the benefits of ELR for reporting timeliness likely will vary by disease.