STATISTICAL RESEARCH SPECIALIST III

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 Description

The Illinois Department of Public Health is seeking a highly motivated individual to serve as Statistical Research Specialist 3. This position will be responsible for, but not limited to, implementing the State of Illinois’s surveillance system for Emergency Department (ED) visit data submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP), formerly known as BioSense; design and deploy IDPH’s ambulatory visit data collection in accordance with Meaningful Use public health reporting requirements, evaluate and analyze all visit data captures in the syndromic surveillance systems for Eligible Hospitals (EHs) and Eligible Provider (Eps) to advance population health surveillance for public health decision-making on prevention, policy, intervention and disease control efforts.

Job Responsibilities

1.  Implements the State of Illinois’s surveillance system for ED visit data.

• Provides direct onboarding support to healthcare facilities through calls with providers and hospital staff to discuss workflow, data capture and correctly structuring HL7 messages to satisfy IDPH reporting requirements.
• Conduct initial data validation and continuous quality assessment of hospital and provider syndromic surveillance visit data.
• Designs and implements statistical analysis on data submitted to the National Syndromic Surveillance Program and ambulatory data collected for Meaningful Use public health reporting.
• Evaluates and analyzes all visit data captured in the syndromic surveillance systems for Eligible Hospitals (EHs) and Eligible Provider (Eps) in ambulatory clinics.
• Evaluates, tests new systems and analytical software applications for data use, visualization, dissemination, and aggregation of multiple data streams.
• Collaborates with other public health professionals in innovative public health practice or research designs that include the analysis of visit data collected from EH and EP as part of their Meaningful Use public health reporting.

2.  Designs an ambulatory syndromic surveillance system for collecting visit data in accordance with Meaningful Use public health reporting.

• Deploys the application by onboarding provider data and conducting statistical analysis.
• Conducts studies of the data collection tool, functioning with technical independence, produces final interpretation of results that include healthcare utilization, disease trends and estimates of incidence.
• Prevalence and associated factors of staff, media and public.
• Published comprehensive reports of findings.

Job Responsibilities (cont)

3.  Conducts advanced statistical analysis of infectious disease data utilizing Illinois-National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (I-NEDSS) Analysis, Visualization and Reporting (AVR) and the NSSP tools, including Business Objects, Crystal Reports R and R Studio software and other analytical tools.

• Applies epidemiologic principles to the design, implementation, and evaluation of I-NEDSS data.
• Analyzes data, evaluating significant and critical factors to solve complex problems.

4.  Performs analysis for testing and validating electronic laboratory data to ensure that laboratory test results are valid and mapped to the correct, reportable conditions utilizing knowledge of infectious disease surveillance and epidemiology for improved outbreak detection and to ensure that accurate information is given to local health department staff to appropriately guide disease investigations.

5.  Responds to inquires from hospitals and providers regarding Meaningful Use public health objectives, maintaining liaisons with these health care providers.

• Serves on the IDPH Meaningful Use team, providing input as it relates to IDPH’s experience with syndromic surveillance.

6.  Performs other duties as required or assigned which are reasonable within the scope of the duties enumerated above.

Minimum Qualifications

• Requires knowledge, skill, and mental development equivalent to completion of four years of college with courses in statistics, computer science, mathematics, public health, and related fields.
• Requires two years of progressively responsible experience in the development and application of research designs and statistical methods and techniques.

Preferred Qualifications

1. Possession of a Master’s degree or higher in public health, medicine, epidemiology, informatics or a related field.
2. Two or more years of experience using SAS, R, Stata, or similar statistical software program for data analysis.
3. One or more years of experience using Tableau or Power BI for report generation, data visualization and analysis.
4. One or more years of experience working with an electronic disease surveillance system.
5. One or more years of experience designing surveys in REDCap or other survey programs.
6. One year experience using Microsoft Access or other database system to manage and query data.