Agency Marketing Statement

The Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) is tasked with the oversight of communities within Illinois to achieve and maintain optimal health and safety. With an annual budget of over $600 million in state and federal funds, 7 regional offices, 3 laboratories and over 1,100 employees, IDPH is equipped to fulfill its mission of protecting the health and wellness of the people of Illinois through the prevention, health promotion, regulation and control of disease and injury.

Position Overview

The Lead/Coordinator of Data Modernization will coordinate and lead agency-wide self-assessment of data modernization and workforce development, as part of the ELC Data Modernization Grant deliverables. Self-assessment will document the status, needs, and opportunities specific to public health data modernization and workforce development. The findings from this annual assessment will help identify jurisdictions' strengths, areas for improvement, and technical assistance needs. In addition, assessment findings should inform each jurisdiction's Data Modernization Plan, which supports upgrading and modernizing infrastructure with new technologies and functionality, identifying data needs to answer essential public health questions, providing data strategy planning and decision support to stakeholders, making comprehensive data available for partners and decision-makers, and strengthening the public health workforce.

Job Responsibilities

• Serves as the lead for the office of Disease Control Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) coordinating DMI activities across all diseases and conditions addressed by the health department.
• Directs the IDPH’s implementation of electronic case reporting including onboarding of data from hospitals, ingesting of data into the surveillance system, validating the contents of the data and ensuring consistency in reporting.
• Works with all sections within the Office of Disease Control (e.g. informatics, public health labs, reportable conditions, vital records, and others) to appropriately select and move forward on modernization strategies in a coordinated and collaborative fashion.
• Obtain support from jurisdiction leadership and engage stakeholders;
• Collect and enter the assessment data in REDCap;
• Develop a summary report of assessment findings;
• Share and confirm assessment results with stakeholders using participatory data interpretation (PDI);
• Use the results of PDI to inform your Data Modernization Plan.
• Author and publish rules for all conditions available in the CDC’s Reportable Conditions Knowledge Management System (RCKMS).
• Ensure that epidemiologists/case investigators have access to the electronic initial case report (eICR) and Reportability Response (RR) in a human readable formate across all condition areas.
• Educate epidemiologists about the change in their workflow that they can expect from eCR.
• Additional tasks will include the following but are not limited to:
  • COVID-19 Long Term Care Data Cleaning
  • Quality Assurance/Data Cleaning COVID-19 I-NEDSS Exposure section
  • Quality Assurance COVID-19 Outbreaks
  • Contact Tracing/Interviewing of contacts
  • Daily Quality Assurance COVID-19 cases
  • COVID-19 Data entry in I-NEDSS including entering faxed lab test results.

Minimum Qualifications

• Requires a Bachelor's Degree.
• Candidate would have working knowledge of I-NEDSS, Business objects, “R”, SAS, SPSS, GIS, EpiInfo, Excel, REDCap and ACCESS.
• Candidate would have working knowledge of conveyance of complex information effectively using oral and written communication.
• Candidate would have working knowledge in planning, organizing, prioritizing and management of projects in a fast paced and high pressure environment.
• Candidate would have working knowledge of analyzing, interpreting and summarizing data and preparing reports.
• Candidate would have 1 year experience with electronic applications and ability to identify solutions to problems and ensure appropriate implementation.
• Candidate would have working knowledge of importance of lab data when investigating an outbreak.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prefer eight (8) years of professional experience in a healthcare or public health setting with health informatics responsibilities that include conducting and/or supporting informatics projects including scientific investigations information architecture management, and implementing data and information standards.
• Prefer Master’s degree with a focus in public health, public health informatics, health care informatics, information technology, computer science, information science, data science, public policy or health policy, statistics or related field and six (6) years of professional experience.
• Prefer Doctoral-level degree such as PhD of Informatics, Doctor of Public Health (Dr.PH.), Doctor of Health Science (D.H.Sc.), Ph.D. Management Information Systems and Technology, Ph.D. Computer Science or closely related field and four (4) years of experience doing senior-level public health informatics work.
• Prefer working knowledge in public health, public health surveillance systems, public health or health informatics and epidemiologic practices. strategies for achieving effective data acquisition, management, quality, storage, use, and application to address public health questions; and data communications security and privacy techniques; legal and ethical issues regarding confidentiality and use of individually identifiable public health and medical record data.
• Prefer working knowledge of strategies for achieving effective data acquisition, management, quality, storage, use, and application to address public health questions; and data communications security and privacy techniques; legal and ethical issues regarding confidentiality and use of individually identifiable public health and medical record data.
• Prefer working knowledge and ability and skills to convey complex information effectively using oral and written communication; analyze, interpret, and summarize data and prepare reports; and plan, organize, prioritize and manage projects, time, and workload assignments in a fast-paced and high pressure environment.