Project Description

Center For Disease Control (CDC)

In today’s global environment, new diseases have the potential to spread across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection and action more important than ever.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recognized as the lead federal agency for protecting the health and safety of people – at home and abroad, providing credible information to enhance health decisions, and promoting health through strong partnerships. CDC serves as the national focus for developing and applying disease prevention and control, environmental health, and health promotion and education activities designed to improve the health of the people of the United States.

CDC works side by side with national, state and local organizations to help protect communities from dangerous environmental exposures. By assisting state and local health departments, CDC works to protect the public every day.

In today’s global environment, new diseases have the potential to spread across the world in a matter of days, or even hours, making early detection and action more important than ever. The ability to have accurate, up-to-date information at hand is essential in emergency response situations. CDC plays a critical role in controlling these diseases, traveling at a moment’s notice to investigate outbreaks abroad or at home.

The CDC’s emergency response team in Atlanta is responsible for handling calls regarding outbreaks and public health threats. The team responds through speedily putting into action approved protocol procedures. While these procedures were thorough in their development, getting access to the information quickly was not optimal. Emergency protocol procedures were paper-based in coded notebooks for emergency reference. In a situation where moments count, having the correct information at hand was essential.
The CDC had originally purchased the Novo Knowledge Base Software to manage an internal reference base of personnel information. After using the software first hand, the CDC recognized its promising use to house important emergency response protocol information. The goal was to provide the first response emergency help desk personnel with the valuable information they needed to initiate an approved response action. Emergency procedures could be stored in the powerful knowledge base for immediate retrieval in an urgent situation. Protocol procedures would be cataloged in the knowledge base to ensure accuracy and speed of retrieval.
The Novo Knowledge Base was united with the help desk system currently being used by the emergency response team. The built-in article category tree allows CDC protocol articles to be easily categorized into the knowledge base system. The Novo knowledge base allows articles to be grouped by topic, with easy to use drill down navigation to locate a specific article by topic. Articles are completely searchable to deliver instant relevant results and robust features allow the knowledge base to be customized for a variety of uses.

Once the protocol procedures were input into the knowledge base, they could be easily referenced within the help desk system. No longer is it necessary to physically locate paper documents – now appropriate procedures are delivered within moments.

Empowering the emergency response team with speedy protocol procedures has been indispensable to the CDC. CDC says “the results are a more efficient, speedy retrieval of information to quickly identify protocol”. Novo solutions is proud to be a part of this critical public health agency.

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