Attachment B NNDSS website 12 13

NNDSS | National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance Systems
Attachment B

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National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System
(NNDSS)
NNDSS Home
CDC’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) is a
multifaceted public health disease surveillance system that gives
public health officials powerful capabilities to monitor the occurrence
and spread of diseases. Facets of NNDSS are used by numerous state,
territorial, tribal, and local health departments; and by partner
organizations, such as the Council of State and Territorial
Epidemiologists (CSTE), to
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facilitate collecting, managing, analyzing, interpreting, and
disseminating health related data for diseases designated as
nationally notifiable,
develop and maintain national standards (for example,
consistent case definitions for nationally notifiable
diseases) applicable across states,
maintain the official national notifiable diseases statistics,
provide detailed data to CDC programs to aid in identifying
specific disease trends,
work with states and partners to implement and assess
prevention and control programs, and
publish summarized data findings from 57 state, territorial,
and local reporting jurisdictions weekly and annually in the
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).

Fact Sheets
NNDSS Fact
sheet
DHIS (proposed)
BioSense
Program

A public health surveillance system, such as NNDSS, is defined as encompassing everything
that supports the activity of collecting and monitoring disease data, including policies, laws,
people, partners, information systems, processes, and resources at the local, state, and national
levels.
Effective public health surveillance begins at the local- and state-health department levels.
They work with a variety of healthcare providers, including laboratories, hospitals, and private
providers, to obtain case reports on many infectious and some non-infectious diseases. Each
state has laws mandating that providers report cases of certain diseases to state and/or local
health departments. These data provide the direction and scope of many state and local health
department activities, from detecting individual cases and controlling outbreaks to
implementing prevention and intervention activities. State health departments support
national public health surveillance by voluntarily sharing a portion of their data with CDC. The
data from states are used by CDC to monitor disease trends, assess the effectiveness of
prevention and control measures, identify populations or geographic areas at high risk,
formulate prevention strategies, develop public health policies, and work with the international

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NNDSS | National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance Systems

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community to identify and contain global outbreaks.
A key component of NNDSS is the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS).
NEDSS provides data and information technology (IT) standards, support, and leadership to
state, local, and territorial health departments that in turn provide CDC with aggregate data on
nationally notifiable diseases and conditions. NEDSS’s capabilities are used to
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support reportable disease surveillance by improving information sharing between
healthcare providers and health departments and between states and CDC,
support Electronic Laboratory Reporting as part of the Meaningful Use initiative to
improve public health disease reporting, and
increase information sharing and system interoperability between state health
departments to improve multi-state disease detection and containment.

Page last reviewed: December 07, 2012
Page last updated: December 07, 2012
Content source: Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1600 Clifton Rd. Atlanta, GA
30333, USA
800-CDC-INFO
800-232-4636 ) TTY: (888) 232-6348 - Contact CDC–
INFO

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10/29/2013