The North Carolina Emergency Department Database will be hosted by Peak 10 under an agreement announced Tuesday.
The new database project includes information from a variety of sources and is designed to provide a means for hospital emergency departments to exchange data as part of public health surveillance. Participants include UNC Healthcare, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NC Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, the NC Department of Health and Human Services and the New Hanover Healthcare Network.
The NCEDD is a collaborative project is designed to develop a statewide emergency department database. Elements include:
- Emergency department data from North Carolina hospitals with minimal impact on hospital resources
- Transmitting the data securely via the Internet on a regularly scheduled basis and near real-time
- Standardizing the data
- Populating an aggregate emergency department database for use by participating hospitals, public health officials, and researchers
- Providing secure access to the data for a variety of users based on defined access levels
- Linking to other appropriate healthcare data systems
- Providing secure, standards-based electronic messaging of public health data
- Demonstrating compliance with HIPAA security and privacy rules for collection, transport of and access to health data
“We reviewed a wide variety of providers and selected Peak 10 to meet our specific needs,” said John McLamb, technical director and security officer for the NCEDD. “Peak 10’s knowledge of HIPAA and data security gave us the experience we needed to add another layer of security and reliability to our Internet and hosting operations.”
Peak 10 provides managed and network services from four centers in Research Triangle Park, Charlotte, Tampa and Jacksonville.
Peak 10: www.peak10.com
NCEDD: www.ncedd.org
