About
Starting Semester: Spring 2025Assigned: No
Location: Atlanta
Georgia Department of Public Health
Client Profile
Georgia Department of Public Health is the state agency responsible for preventing disease, injury, and disability within the state of Georgia. HIV Surveillance sits within the Epidemiology Division and oversees case reporting for all individuals living in Georgia, monitors the HIV care continuum to determine whether people with HIV are in care and virally suppressed, evaluates perinatal HIV exposure, and detects and monitors cluster of HIV.Project Description
Our partners include the Office of HIV/AIDS, which oversees HIV prevention and care within the state of Georgia, our 18 Public Health Districts, community-based organizations, and HIV care providers. These partners are responsible for HIV prevention and care and they all strive to use data-driven strategies; data which comes from HIV Surveillance. Our biggest limitation in providing these data is timeliness. At this time, we typically finalize our data 1.5 years after it is collected. For example, our current finalized data which is used to generate reports, presentations, and fulfill data requests is from 2022. There are many reasons for this delay, some of which are out of our control. However, we recognize that there are several steps within the data quality process that could be improved. Enhancing our data quality process will boost our efficiency and enable us to achieve our benchmark goals at a faster pace.We are looking for ways to shorten the timeframe to provide our partners with reliable and accurate data. Ideally, we would shorten this to 6 months. This would involve increasing the speed at which we:
- De-duplicate cases
- Identify missing data (i.e. demographics, risk factors, current address)
- Identify missing laboratory data (i.e. viral loads or genotypes)
- Identify and address data quality issues (i.e. transgender data quality)
Some proposed activities could include developing processes that allow us to:
- Maintain a real-time follow up list of cases
- Plan, track, and report case follow-up activities
- Identify facilities case count (i.e. increase or decrease in reporting)
- Evaluating our outcome measures in real-time
- Using data summaries to identify anomalies quickly