Our statewide disease detectives (whose job it is to slow the spread of communicable diseases) need real-time electronic surveillance in order to get the job done.  Our I.T. folks and the people in Public Health Preparedness have been working on an upgraded system to help them for the last several months- and our new Medical Electronic Disease Surveillance Intelligence System (MEDSIS) went online last  week.  

MEDSIS allows all 15 county and 4 tribal health departments to monitor and manage infectious diseases.  Some hospitals in the state are tapping into the system as well.  This newest edition has a Spanish version so our counterparts in Sonora can enter data and we can track diseases that may pop up on both sides of the border – like influenza, Valley Fever and TB. 

The bottom line is we can now track these diseases more quickly and more accurately and we have something new in the toolbox to quickly discover an outbreak.  Many thanks to all the staff who worked so diligently on this project- including Nita Surathu, Javed Mukarram, Michael Conklin, Shandy Odell, Lloyd Kalicki and Victor Sanchez, Arup Sinha, Joe Enos, Noel Ramirez, Robert Howard, and Srinivasa Venkatesan.