North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, Raleigh, NC.
Sex Transm Dis. 2023 Aug 1;50(8S Suppl 1):S18-S22. doi: 10.1097/OLQ.0000000000001740. Epub 2022 Nov 21.
Disease intervention specialists (DIS) are the cornerstone of public health. However, the incremental gains of DIS-led interventions are difficult to detect at the population level. Health departments attempt to quantify the impact of key DIS activities through performance measures that assess how many and how quickly both patients are interviewed, and contacts are notified, tested, and treated. However, DIS work encompasses more than case finding and existing performance measures may not capture the full value DIS provide to health departments. In this article, we first describe how DIS investigations and contact tracing are conducted for sexually transmitted diseases and other communicable diseases to understand how the definition of effectiveness may vary by disease. Then, we examine the benefits and limitations of traditional performance measures using syphilis investigations as an example. Recognizing the limits of existing measures will improve our understanding of DIS impact and assist in the development of new measures of effectiveness that better represent the totality of DIS work.
疾病干预专家（DIS）是公共卫生的基石。然而，在人群层面上，很难检测到由 DIS 主导的干预措施的增量收益。卫生部门试图通过绩效评估来量化 DIS 活动的影响，这些评估衡量了有多少患者以及患者和接触者被采访、通知、检测和治疗的速度有多快。然而，DIS 的工作不仅仅是发现病例，而且现有的绩效评估方法可能无法捕捉到 DIS 为卫生部门提供的全部价值。在本文中，我们首先描述了 DIS 如何进行性传播疾病和其他传染病的调查和接触者追踪，以了解有效性的定义如何因疾病而异。然后，我们以梅毒调查为例，研究了传统绩效评估方法的优点和局限性。认识到现有措施的局限性将有助于我们更好地理解 DIS 的影响，并有助于开发新的有效性衡量标准，更好地代表 DIS 工作的整体情况。
