What is RCKMS?

The Reportable Conditions Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) is an authoritative, real-time portal to enhance disease surveillance. RCKMS provides comprehensive information on public health reporting requirements to public health reporters such as clinicians and laboratories.

The RCKMS tool consists of 3 parts:

1. Authoring Interface: A web portal for public health agencies to input, edit and manage their jurisdictional reporting criteria

• Public health users enter their jurisdictional reporting specifications through the Authoring Interface website.
• To ease the burden of users having to input criteria from scratch, the authoring interface comes pre-populated with default reporting specifications. Users can choose to adopt and use the default as is or adjust it to meet their jurisdictional needs.
• The tool also includes commonly requested optional reporting specifications that jurisdictions can select from. If the listed options do not meet a jurisdiction’s needs, a user can also request for the addition of a specific criteria.

2. Knowledge Repository: The database containing data on reporting specifications

• After being entered by users, reporting specifications are stored in the knowledge repository and deployed to the decision support service. As updates to reporting specifications are needed, a jurisdiction user can log into the RCKMS Authoring Interface to make the necessary changes and redeploy for those updates to take effect.

3. Decision Support Service: A decision support service (DSS) that healthcare reporters can invoke to determine if a potential case is reportable, and to which jurisdiction(s)

• The RCKMS DSS is invoked by an automated call from an EHR system, either directly or through an intermediary service.
• The DSS returns a response of whether the potential case is reportable, which jurisdiction(s) it may be reportable to, and other relevant reporting information.

RCKMS is an integral piece of the electronic case reporting (eCR) centralized infrastructure. Public health agencies (PHAs) populate the tool with jurisdiction reporting requirements so that electronic initial case reports (eICRs) from healthcare can be processed against them to determine if the case report is reportable and to which PHA(s) the report should be sent.

• RCKMS is hosted centrally on the APHL Informatics Messaging Service (AIMS) Platform.
• EHR systems implement the Reportable Conditions Trigger Codes (RCTC) into their systems.
• A match in the EHR to the RCTC would trigger the sending of a report to the AIMS platform, which invokes the RCKMS DSS for evaluation.
• RCKMS determines the reportability of the electronic initial case report (eICR) and to which public health jurisdiction(s) the eICR would be sent.
• A Reportability Response (RR) is generated documenting if any condition(s) were found to be reportable, to which jurisdiction(s) reporting is required and additional information, such as contact information of the relevant public health jurisdiction.
• If the potential case is found reportable, AIMS routes the RR back to the healthcare provider and the eICR and RR to the appropriate public health jurisdiction.

RCKMS uses current standards for eCR including the HL7 initial electronic case report version 1.1 (eICR v1.1) data format.

Why RCKMS?

Accurate, timely and complete coverage of reportable conditions depends on healthcare reporters having correct and current information regarding specific reporting criteria.

RCKMS aims to address the following challenges with the existing reporting system:

• Reporting criteria are difficult for human users to locate, as there is no single place where information can be accessed.
• Reporting criteria are complex and differ across state and local jurisdictions
• Information is generally human-readable and not in a format suitable for machine-processing

Benefits for Public Health
RCKMS strengthens disease surveillance in the US by:

• Providing a single authoritative portal for public health to efficiently author, manage and update reporting specifications as they change over time
• Providing a mechanism to communicate updates to reporters
• Improving the completeness of case reports sent to public health by reporters
• Advocating examination of variability in reporting existing across jurisdictions

Benefits for Reporters

RCKMS can decrease the time and effort needed by healthcare professionals to comply with reporting requirements by providing:

• A centralized decision support service that can provide an automated determination of whether a case is reportable and to which jurisdiction(s)
• A mechanism to receive updates of when PH requirements are changed or updated (future functionality)

· Enhanced bi-directional communication between reporters and public health

Contact Us:

For more information, please contact rckms@cste.org and visit http://www.rckms.org to learn more.