title: Residents' perspectives on the use of the Internet to improve infectious disease reporting.
abstract: Reports of infectious diseases to local and state public health agencies are often delayed and incomplete. Some of the clinicians charged with the responsibility for making notifications encounter various difficulties in reporting. These may include heavy patient loads that make it easy to forget to file reports, or cumbersome disease reporting mechanisms and systems. For some percentage of practitioners, knowledge of what and when to report infectious diseases is less than optimal. However, it is not clear how reporting methods or systems could be designed or improved, owing to lack of data on physicians' knowledge and views about them. We conducted a survey of resident physicians at three university teaching hospitals in Pennsylvania to ascertain their knowledge about reporting timeframe and responsibility, as well as their attitudes toward various methods to enhance disease reporting.
authors.affiliation: Pennsylvania Department of Health, Harrisburg, PA, USA.
authors.forename: Nkuchia
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: M'ikanatha
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Holmes
authors.forename: Marian
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Michaels
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Aber
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Simons
authors.forename: Eugene
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lengrich
authors.forename: Allen
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kunselman
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Southwell
authors.forename: Kirsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Waller
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rankin
authors.forename: Adrianne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Farley
authors.forename: Ebbing
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lautenbach
mesh_terms: D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D001292:Attitude to Computers; D018563:Disease Notification / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D007396:Internship and Residency; D008297:Male; D010414:Pennsylvania; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires