Manifest MedEx, California’s leading nonprofit health data network, collaborated with J2 Interactive to design and implement a new electronic lab surveillance system and disease registry.
The Challenge
The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) hosts a massive Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR) database to protect the welfare of over 40 million residents and visitors. The statewide response to COVID-19 caused information volumes to soar, and the state needed a better way to collect, organize, track, and report lab result registry data. To meet growing requirements, the department expanded its original platform to create the Surveillance and Public Health Information Reporting and Exchange (SaPHIRE) in 2020.
By 2022, SaPHIRE’s success encouraged CDPH to modernize the system for future growth and expanded use. To help with this goal, they sought HIT vendor partners who could:
- Deploy a “front door” for data submissions to the California Reportable Disease Information Exchange (CalREDIE), the state’s electronic lab reporting solution
- Implement and launch a new platform for data acquisition and aggregation, building on the state’s extensive investment in Rhapsody
- Streamline the ingestion of exponentially growing volumes of lab and other types of data from across the state
- Normalize data from multiple complex domains and more than 350 sources
- Troubleshoot and improve data quality over time
Moreover, the urgency of the project dictated an extremely aggressive timeline. CDPH needed a team it could trust to develop and deploy the new SaPHIRE platform and migrate all participating labs to the new system, within the space of just a few months.
The Solution
In developing a winning proposal for the SaPHIRE initiative, MX sought a collaborator with extensive health information exchange expertise, a broad range of technical capabilities, and a proven ability to deliver complex solutions under extreme time pressure. They turned to J2 Interactive, a longtime trusted partner, to support their bid and help design a comprehensive solution that addressed all of CDPH’s requirements.
J2 helped Manifest MedEx meet the state’s aggressive deadline by onboarding
more than four data submitters per day over a span of three months.
“Since our earliest days, J2 has augmented our team not only as additional interoperability experts, but as strategic technical advisors. Our partnership with J2 has enabled us to improve millions of lives across the State of California, both through our core HIE capabilities and through special projects like SaPHIRE. J2’s expertise and hard work were absolutely critical to our successful delivery of a statewide electronic lab result registry within an aggressive timeline and budget.”
The Results
Once the award was made, J2 worked closely with MX to plan and execute a comprehensive strategy for enabling efficient, reliable, and secure public health interoperability across the State of California. J2’s specific contributions included assisting MX with:
- Mobilizing a team of solution architects, Rhapsody engineers, and HIE subject matter experts
- Building the necessary interoperability framework to enable secure inbound and outbound data feeds with over 350 participants
- Migrating all participants to the new platform
- Creating pipelines to normalize and route all collected data to CDPH
- Integrating Rhapsody’s integration and message compliance verification engine with third-party message content uplift technology
- Building data validation capabilities to screen inbound messages
- Implementing enhancements on the fly to swiftly address data quality issues
J2 also helped MX and CDPH standardize and improve the quality of the data feeds. To achieve this, J2 collaborated with MX to introduce detailed reporting and data visualizations to identify data improvement opportunities that better inform public health decision-making.
J2 continues to support MX, and by extension the State of California, as a trusted advisor through the ongoing maintenance and operations of SaPHIRE and related projects. Most recently, following the success of the initial project, CDPH took steps to expand on the promise of SaPHIRE as a modernized, future-oriented, and robust lab data and public health reporting platform. CDPH needed to implement a new capability for ingesting electronic case reports(“eCRs”), and once again turned to MX and J2 to realize their vision.
J2 is committed to applying our experience to make a positive impact on government agencies, healthcare organizations, and the communities they serve. Our collaboration with Manifest MedEx for the benefit of California’s 40 million residents is just one example. Drop us a line to learn more about how we can help you meet your strategic goals.
