Residents' perspectives on the use of the Internet to improve infectious disease reporting

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.