US Virgin Islands Launches Modernized NBS 7 Disease Surveillance System to Transform Public Health: Implementation Report

The useful part

May 6, 2025, with USVI becoming the first US jurisdiction using AWS for implementation of NBS 7 and the second using NBS 7 in production, overall. To date, the VIDOH successfully reonboarded 106 of 109 (97%) previously connected electronic reporting facilities and onboarded 1 new reporting laboratory previously unable to connect due to interoperability barriers. Updating the USVI database to NBS 7 in a locally owned, cloud-hosted, AWS environment has improved disease surveillance specifically by providing the most up-to-date Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–sup...

How it works

• During January 2024, the US Virgin Islands (USVI) Department of Health (VIDOH) identified a critical need to maintain the cloud-hosted National Electronic Disease Surveillance System Base System (NBS)...
• The VIDOH implemented a phased migration strategy that included planning and cost-benefit assessment, deployment of NBS 7 within AWS, database migration, validation and optimization, and staged reonboarding...
• Benefits of this change included nearly 90% cost savings (preliminarily estimated at 80%), additional bandwidth, real-time data ingestion and updates, an opportunity to build local informatics capacity, and...

Details worth keeping

After consulting with federal partners and subject matter experts, VIDOH's leadership chose to migrate the integrated disease surveillance system to a new platform hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and update the NBS instance to the most advanced version, NBS 7.