With this new funding, the DOH plans to expand activities focusing on highly infectious diseases to include not only hospitals and emergency rooms, but also urgent care centers and retail walk-in clinic sites that serve as first points of entry into the healthcare system.  

The DOH will provide technical assistance, expertise, and advice to urgent care and walk-in clinic staff to assure that these sites are prepared to: 

a. Identify patients exposed to or symptomatic of highly infectious diseases that require specific treatment measures 

b. Isolate identified patients as required per protocol 

c. Initiate appropriate local/regional notification protocols regarding infectious patients 

d. Utilize best practice for patient transportation mode 

e. Utilize appropriate policy procedure templates and checklists associated with the management of exposed or symptomatic patients

The City of St. Louis Department of Health maintains multiple surveillance systems designed to monitor the health of the population, detect disease outbreaks, and identify the occurrence of unusual diseases. It is a system for early detection of community outbreaks, bio-terrorist events and for generally monitoring the health of the community. For City of St. Louis Public Schools, the School Syndromic Surveillance system collects indicator data from City of St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS) that are located throughout the city. 

Until recently, surveillance was conducted at each school in the City of St. Louis Public School District by emailing a word document with case counts of students to DOH epidemiologists. Because the data entry from the nurses's records must be hand-transcribed to a spreadsheet for analysis of data, there is the potential for human error. This is also a time-consuming process. 

Now, the DOH epidemiologists are updating their delivery method of School Syndromic Surveillance. Using Qualtrics, the school nurses will submit the form using survey technology. This data can be assessed quickly using prepared reports or even downloaded into an excel file for rapid statistical computation. As a result, DOH epidemiologists will be able to conduct School Syndromic Surveillance in a more timely manner, minimize the element of human error, and identify outbreaks or concerns with SLPS schools.