Starting Point: Your Surveillance Priorities

• Tell me about the top surveillance priority your team is accountable for right now.
• How many data sources feed the systems you use today, counting hospitals, labs, immunization providers, and vital records? Options: 1-5, 6-20, 21-50, 51-100, 100+
• When was the last time federal reporting requirements forced you to change a workflow or submit a one-off file? Options: Within last 3 months, 3-6 months ago, 6-12 months ago, More than a year ago, Never
• Who on your team is the day-to-day owner for surveillance data quality and reporting? Options: Epidemiologist, CIO or IT director, Informatics lead, Data manager, Other
• Describe the reporting cadence you must meet for CDC and state-level reports. Options: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Ad hoc
• Which stakeholders find incomplete or delayed data most costly to their work? Options: Epidemiology program leads, CIO/IT team, Laboratory directors, Clinical partners, State leadership, Federal reporting office

Where Your Current System Falls Short

• What single operational failure in your current surveillance stack would make you pause a procurement today?
• If that failure happens, who is first to notice and how is it typically reported? Options: Program email/alert, Phone call to IT, Ticket in help desk, Noticed in monthly review, Other
• Walk me through a recent incident where reporting or case management broke down, and its downstream impact.
• How do you measure the time from a lab result arriving to it appearing in your case management view? Options: Automated metric, Manual audit, Ad hoc checks, Not measured
• On average, how many manual interventions are required per day to reconcile incoming lab feeds? Options: 0-5, 6-20, 21-50, 51-100, 100+

What's Getting in the Way of Reliable Reporting

• Which integration gap causes the most missed or duplicate reports in your environment? Options: Missing lab HL7 feeds, Inconsistent immunization records, No FHIR endpoints from partners, Duplicate case creation, Other
• Are there data formats or interfaces your partners cannot produce reliably today? Options: HL7 v2 inconsistent, FHIR not available, Flat files with variable schema, Paper or fax-only partners, No major format issues
• Who controls the integration endpoints at your major lab and hospital partners? Options: External partner IT, Internal integration team, Third-party vendor, Unknown
• Provide the formats and accessibility status for the datasets to be migrated, noting any known schema differences.
• Outline the fallback options that would keep the project alive if a data-sharing agreement misses your target window. Options: Scoped pilot with limited data, Synthetic or de-identified data, Staged rollouts by partner, Project pause

Alternatives You Are Considering

• Why would your team prefer to stay with the current approach rather than change to an external platform?
• List the alternatives you have evaluated or are still evaluating, including the incumbent, other vendors, and internal build. Options: Incumbent vendor, Another vendor, Internal build, Open source solution, Maintain current systems
• For any alternative that involves building internally, who has proposed it and what resource commitments would it require?
• What would have to be true about your current approach for you to decide to stay with it instead of moving forward with the seller?
• When you consider the internal build path, what is the earliest realistic delivery date you would expect? Options: Within 3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, 12+ months, Unsure

Can You Meet the Technical and Compliance Gates?

• Name the single prerequisite that, if unmet, would stop deployment from starting.
• Identify the named integration owner for each external partner and whether they can approve connection changes. Options: Yes, single owner per partner, Multiple owners across teams, No clear owner, Contractor or third party
• How many staff hours per week can your team realistically allocate to integration and testing? Options: <5 hours, 5-10 hours, 11-20 hours, 21-40 hours, 40+ hours
• Provide the availability and format for each dataset the project depends on, including whether data owners have signed access approvals.
• Are there regulatory reviews, legal approvals, or data use agreements that regularly delay projects, and how long do they typically take? Options: <2 weeks, 2-6 weeks, 6-12 weeks, 12+ weeks
• Outline your contingency plan if key integration owners cannot provide API access during the planned testing window.

How You Will Measure Success and Accept Work

• Assuming a pilot shows the expected reduction in manual reconciliation, what could still prevent you from signing the contract that week?
• List the three metrics you would require to validate a successful pilot for reporting acceptance. Options: Reduction in manual reconciliation (%), Time to report (hours), Data completeness (%), Duplicate report reduction, Other
• On average, what reporting latency from lab arrival to public health dashboard is acceptable for you? Options: <1 hour, 1-6 hours, 6-24 hours, 24-72 hours, 72+ hours
• Identify who signs off on a go-live decision and the specific evidence they require.
• For each acceptance criterion, indicate whether you require automated validation or manual sampling. Options: Automated validation required, Manual sampling acceptable, Both
• Rate how critical continuous CDC feed conformity is to initial go-live, using high, medium, low. Options: High, Medium, Low

Decision Timeline and Political Drivers

• When a key stakeholder asks how soon you can show measurable value, what date do you give them? Options: Within 30 days, Within 60 days, Within 90 days, Longer than 90 days, Unsure
• Catalog the internal champions and likely blockers by role and decision authority.
• Estimate the number of procurement or budget review steps that must be completed before you can sign a vendor contract. Options: 1-2, 3-5, 6-10, 10+
• Assuming the pilot meets its targets, who can approve an expedited purchase and do they have budget authority now? Options: Yes, budget authority now, Yes, after sign-off, No, requires additional approval, Unknown
• Explain the amount of timeline slippage that would be fatal to your funding window.

Commitment Signals and Next Steps

• Suppose the pilot demonstrates the key metrics, what would still prevent you from committing within your quarter?
• Name the roles the seller should list as owners on the project plan for the first 90 days. Options: Project manager, Integration lead, Product owner, Clinical lead, Data steward
• How often do you want status updates during integration testing, and which format do you prefer? Options: Weekly written, Twice weekly written, Weekly standup (video), Daily digest email, Ad hoc on request
• When you think about post-live support, how many months of hypercare would you expect to include in the initial contract? Options: 0-1 months, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, 6+ months
• What reporting or data access commitments would accelerate your procurement if they were included in the contract?
• Are you prepared to assign a named buyer owner who can make budget decisions within 30 days of a successful pilot? Options: Yes, Maybe, No

• Solution Experience: Integrating Laboratory, Clinical, and Vital Records

• Confirm the current state and its cost
• You confirm the demonstrated workflow eliminates the manual reconciliation and reduces time to report for the shown scenario.
• Provide sample HL7/FHIR messages and a representative extract of clinical and vital records for the two priority scenarios to be run in the POE environment.
• You agree the displayed field mappings satisfy the CDC reporting elements for the scenario or identify the exact mapping gaps remaining.
• Walk an end-to-end buyer scenario
• Deliver a scenario run report and a mapping spreadsheet that shows field-level transformations and missing elements for buyer review within 5 business days.
• Show how fields map to reporting mandates
• You agree on the technical owners and acceptance criteria needed to advance to configuration and scope.
• Identify the integration endpoint owners and a test partner contact for each data source required for the validated scenario.
• Confirm integration responsibilities and cutover approach
• Validation, confirm this matches what you meant

• Solution Experience: Integrating Laboratory, Clinical, and Vital Records
• Solution Experience Deck
• Solution Brief

• meeting
• slides
• document

• Configure HL7 Lab Interfaces
• Set Up FHIR Clinical Endpoints
• Onboard Flat-File Data Feeds
• Integrate Hospital ADT Feeds
• Connect State Lab Information Systems
• Deploy Syndromic Surveillance Ingest
• Migrate Immunization Registry Data
• Migrate Vital Records and Birth/Death Data
• Deploy Reportable Condition Case Management
• Configure CDC and State Automated Reporting
• Map and Normalize Clinical Code Sets
• Train Users and Provision Role Access
• Ongoing Platform Maintenance and Standards Updates

Configure HL7 Lab Interfaces

• List the sending laboratory systems (hospital lab, reference lab, public health lab) that will connect via HL7 ELR to your integration endpoint Options: Hospital laboratory, Commercial/reference laboratory, State public health laboratory, Other
• Provide the HL7 v2 message types and trigger events you expect from each lab (for example ORU^R01 for results, R01/ORU details)
• How many ELR messages per day do you expect from each sender system Options: Under 100, 100-1,000, 1,000-10,000, 10,000+
• Estimate the percentage of lab results that include standard LOINC codes versus local/test-specific codes Options: 0-25%, 25-50%, 50-75%, 75-100%
• Identify the secure transport methods your labs can support for HL7 v2 (select all that apply) Options: MLLP over TLS, SFTP (batch files), HTTPS webservice, Other
• Which acceptance criteria will confirm successful ELR ingestion and normalization (for example parsing success rate, LOINC mapping coverage, and timely arrival window) Options: >99% parse success, >95% required LOINC mapping coverage, Median delivery within 4 hours, Manual validation of 50 sample records

Set Up FHIR Clinical Endpoints

• List the EHRs or clinical systems that will expose FHIR endpoints to the platform
• Provide the FHIR resources you require the endpoints to support (for example Patient, Observation, Immunization, Condition) Options: Patient, Observation, Immunization, Condition, Encounter, Other
• How many historical clinical records (approximate patient counts) do you plan to extract via FHIR bulk or individual resource reads Options: <1,000 patients, 1,000-10,000, 10,000-100,000, 100,000+
• Specify the FHIR version and profiles your partners currently support (for example R4, US Core profiles) Options: R4 (US Core), R4 (custom profiles), DSTU2/R3, Not sure
• Indicate the authentication/authorization method for FHIR endpoints you expect to use Options: OAuth2 (SMART on FHIR), Mutual TLS, API key, Other
• Describe the method you will use for patient matching on FHIR resources (for example probabilistic match on name/DOB/SSN or existing state identifier)

Onboard Flat-File Data Feeds

• Name the sources that will deliver flat-file extracts (for example laboratory CSV, vital records pipe-delimited files) and the producing system for each
• Provide the file formats and schema types you receive today (for example CSV with headers, fixed-width, HL7-derived pipe-delimited) Options: CSV with headers, Pipe-delimited, Fixed-width, XML, Other
• How frequently are flat-file extracts produced by each source (for example daily batch at 03:00, hourly) Options: Hourly, Daily, Weekly, Ad-hoc
• Specify the secure delivery method you will use for flat files to the integration endpoint Options: SFTP, AS2, HTTPS POST, Manual upload
• Are there PHI redaction or de-identification rules that must be applied to flat files before ingestion (for example redact SSN, mask address) Options: Yes - predefined fields, No, Partial - case-by-case
• How will you validate row- and field-level mappings for flat-file imports (for example sample file mapping sign-off, schema validation report)

Integrate Hospital ADT Feeds

• Identify the hospitals or health systems that will supply ADT feeds and the receiving interface endpoints
• Provide the HL7 ADT event types and versions expected (for example ADT^A01, ADT^A03, HL7 v2.5.1) Options: ADT A01/A03/A08 (v2.5.1), ADT A01/A03 only, Other versions
• How many ADT messages per day do you anticipate from each hospital Options: Under 1,000, 1,000-10,000, 10,000-50,000, 50,000+
• Describe how ADT identifiers (medical record number, visit number) should map to your state/local patient identifiers
• Are there custom Z-segments or non-standard segments in your ADT messages that require mapping (for example local allergy segment or bed assignment Z-seg) Options: Yes - custom segments present, No - standard only, Unsure - need to inspect sample messages
• Who on your team will be the technical owner for ADT feed onboarding and ongoing monitoring

Connect State Lab Information Systems

• List the state lab system endpoints and the interface protocols they support (for example HL7 v2 MLLP, SFTP, FHIR API)
• Provide any state-specific envelope or PHIN messaging requirements we must follow for lab exchanges Options: PHIN profile required, Standard HL7 v2 only, State-specific envelope
• How often does the state lab publish result batches or allow queries (for example real-time, hourly batch, daily) Options: Real-time, Hourly batch, Daily batch, Ad-hoc
• Specify the technical contact at the state lab for integration testing and ongoing problem resolution
• Are there mandated audit or acknowledgement workflows for state lab results (for example NACK/ACK handling, automated retransmit) Options: Standard ACK required, Custom ack/retry workflow, None specified
• How will we track and reconcile missing or rejected lab messages from the state LIS (for example daily reconciliation report)

Deploy Syndromic Surveillance Ingest

• Identify the emergency departments and urgent care sites that will submit syndromic surveillance feeds
• Provide the expected HL7 message types, chief complaint fields, and diagnosis vocabularies used (for example ICD-10, SNOMED CT) in sender messages Options: ICD-10, SNOMED CT, Local codes, Other
• Specify the near-real-time latency requirement for syndromic data ingestion (for example within 1 hour of encounter) Options: Within 15 minutes, Within 1 hour, Within 6 hours, Daily batch
• Describe any syndrome definitions or case rules you need applied on ingestion (for example respiratory syndrome per CDC NSSP definitions)
• Do you require natural language processing or chief-complaint normalization to support syndrome classification Options: Yes - NLP required, No - structured fields only, Optional
• How will you measure classification accuracy during testing (for example percent agreement with manual review)

Migrate Immunization Registry Data

• List the legacy immunization registry exports available for migration and approximate record counts
• Provide the vaccine coding systems in use in your registry (for example CVX codes, MVX, NDC) and any local codes Options: CVX, MVX, NDC, Local codes
• Name the fields that must be preserved for each immunization event (for example lot number, administration date, provider, VIS date)
• Specify your required deduplication and patient-matching threshold for immunization records (for example auto-match at 95% probability) Options: Auto-match at 95% threshold, Auto-match at 90% threshold, Manual review required
• Which migration acceptance criteria will confirm the immunization data migration is complete (for example field-level mapping coverage >=99%, reconciliation of total immunizations) Options: >=99% field mapping, Reconcile counts within 0.5%, Sample-based clinical validation
• Who will approve the final migration reconciliation report for the immunization registry

Migrate Vital Records and Birth/Death Data

• List the vital records datasets in scope (for example birth certificates, death records) and their originating systems
• Provide the file formats and schemas for vital records exports (for example XML schema, CSV with specified headers) Options: XML, CSV with headers, Custom fixed-width, Other
• Specify required field-level validation rules for vital records (for example date of birth format, numeric birth weight range, ICD-10 cause-of-death codes)
• Describe how linkage between birth records and maternal records must be handled during migration
• Are there statutory retention, archival, or access restrictions that affect how migrated vital records are stored and accessed Options: Yes - statutory restrictions, No, Partial - some datasets restricted
• Who is authorized to sign off on data acceptance for migrated birth and death records

Deploy Reportable Condition Case Management

• List the notifiable conditions and associated report forms that must be implemented (for example tuberculosis, measles, hepatitis) and any condition-specific fields
• Provide the case investigation workflows required (for example auto-create from positive ELR, manual case intake, referral routing) Options: Auto-create from ELR, Manual intake, Referral routing, Other
• What evidence will validate case creation and report submission workflows are accepted (for example executed test cases, automated submission receipts to state endpoint) Options: Successful test case run, Receipt acknowledgement from receiving endpoint, Sample clinical validation
• Describe how lab results should link to existing or new cases (for example link by patient match + condition code within 14 days)
• Specify notification and escalation timelines for case triage and contact tracing actions Options: Within 24 hours, Within 48 hours, Custom timeline
• Who will own case closure criteria and retention policies once case management is live

Configure CDC and State Automated Reporting

• List the automated reporting targets required (for example NNDSS, state immunization reporting, ELR to CDC/state) and the data feeds that feed each target
• Provide the submission formats and schedules required by each reporting authority (for example daily HL7, weekly aggregate CSV) Options: Real-time HL7, Daily batch, Weekly summary, Ad-hoc
• Specify the transport method for automated submissions (for example SFTP push, API with mutual TLS, web portal upload) Options: SFTP push, API (HTTPS/mTLS), Web portal upload, Other
• Describe the reconciliation and acknowledgement workflow you require for automated reports (for example automated resend on NACK, daily reconciliation log)
• Are there state privacy or data-minimization rules that change the data elements sent to a specific reporting authority Options: Yes - element suppression required, No, Partial
• What retry and SLA thresholds should automated reporting adhere to (for example 3 retry attempts over 24 hours) Options: 3 retries over 24 hours, 5 retries over 72 hours, Custom

• Master Services Agreement (MSA)
• Statement of Work (SOW)
• Subscription Order Form
• Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Data Processing & Privacy Addendum (DPA / HIPAA BAA)
• Procurement & Security Addendum
• Acceptance Certificate & Go-Live Agreement
• Change Order Agreement

• Go-live Health Check (weeks 1-4)
• First Measurement Review (weeks 4-10)
• Acceptance Gate Meeting (around day 90)
• Quarterly Success Review (ongoing)

• Schedule implementation windows for approved enhancements and document acceptance criteria for each change.
• Update field mapping and transformation documentation to reflect agreed fixes.
• Publish an interim metrics dashboard snapshot for the acceptance gate review.
• Restate acceptance criteria and numeric targets recorded in Solution Scope
• Produce a documented acceptance decision for each acceptance criterion recorded in Solution Scope, with pass/fail outcomes captured.
• For any failed criteria, record a remediation plan with owners and fixed completion dates sufficient to close the acceptance loop.
• Verify the incumbent system retirement plan is executed or agreed, preventing dual-operation and ensuring data is archived or retained read-only as documented.
• Publish the acceptance record and outcome evidence to the shared project workspace and archive the meeting record.
• Create remediation tasks for failed criteria with owners, acceptance retest steps, and firm due dates.
• Execute the incumbent decommissioning checklist or record the retention/read-only plan and its milestones.
• Trend review of named metrics versus Solution Scope targets
• Verify whether CDC reporting completeness (%) and case investigation turnaround time (hours) are on track relative to Solution Scope targets and document any variance.
• Ensure all high-priority operational issues have owners and committed resolution dates, and confirm the ticket burn-down plan.
• Agree the priority and timing for any approved enhancements that will affect production behavior or reporting.
• Publish the quarterly metrics dashboard with notes on variance and planned corrective actions.
• Create or update remediation tasks for any persistent high-severity tickets with target resolution dates.
• Re-confirm success criteria and ownership
• Confirm the deployment completed against the functional checkpoints recorded in Solution Scope and identify any incomplete items.
• Document all high-priority blockers with owners and target resolution dates.
• Capture initial adoption signals and list follow-up training or access tasks required.
• Publish a deployment validation report including record counts, integration statuses, and open defects for async review.
• Log and assign remediation tasks for each high-priority blocker with target completion dates.
• Schedule first measurement session within 4-10 weeks to review early outcome data.
• Present first production data against named metrics
• Establish whether timely lab report ingestion rate (%) and hours per week spent on manual reporting are moving toward Solution Scope targets and quantify the gap where present.
• Assign owners and dates for each corrective action required to address root causes of metric gaps.
• Confirm a clear timeline and criteria for the acceptance gate meeting.
• Deliver a data-quality ticket list with priority, expected fix date, and the validation test to confirm resolution.
• Present outcome data against each criterion
• Operational issues and ticket burn-down
• Deployment and migration validation
• Diagnose root causes for metric gaps
• Document pass/fail per criterion and record acceptance decision
• Early adoption signals and usage patterns
• Prioritized enhancements and maintenance backlog
• Agree corrective actions with owners and dates
• Risk review and dependencies
• Agree remediation plan for any failed criteria
• Open issues and blockers
• Confirm timeline to the acceptance gate
• Record data integrity and mapping updates needed
• Incumbent system decommissioning verification
• Confirm next steps and cadence
• Agree immediate remediation actions and next checkpoint