MENDS

Multi-state EHR-based Network for Disease Surveillance (MENDS) is a distributed network that leverages electronic health record (EHR) data to generate timely prevalence estimates of chronic disease measures at national and local levels.

About MENDS

In 2018, the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors funded by the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, initiated the pilot of Multi-state EHR-based Network for Disease Surveillance (MENDS).

MENDS is a distributed network for surveillance that leverages electronic health record (EHR) data to generate timely prevalence estimates of chronic disease risk measures at national and local levels. MENDS can be accessed by health departments and other authorized users for monitoring trends, informing policies, planning programs, and evaluating outcomes to improve the health of the population.

MENDS has an implementation focus on six key areas:

Governance
Partnerships
Technical infrastructure and support
Chronic disease algorithms and validation
Weighting and modeling
Workforce education for public health data users

Project Resources

MENDS Partners

Groups guiding the MENDS project include:

Partner Sites

The MENDS project involves five pilot partner sites. These sites represent both data contributors and data users. Data contributors are healthcare organizations or data aggregators contributing data to MENDS. Data users are organizations within a partner site using MENDS data as surveillance, such as a State or Local Health Department. Partners piloting the MENDS project include: