Epi_Helper

• Create a new file folder in your working directory for Epi_Helper.
• Click the Download Epi_Helper button.
• Extract all files from the newly downloaded Epi_Helper zip file into your newly created file folder.

Epi_Helper was created to help local health departments in MI quickly and easily create communicable disease surveillance reports from MDSS output csv data files. The tool includes two parts:

1. Query Assistant - remembers the case status and investigation status settings for groups of reportable diseases of interest. Guides the user through MDSS report queries
2. Automated Pipeline - intakes MDSS-generated csv files, extracts relevent disease data, cleans & preprocesses, then inputs data into a master dataset.csv

The pipeline is dynamic in that the user creates a config file to select case and investigation status settings for groups of reportable diseases. The Query Assistant checks MDSS output csv files case and investigation status metadata against the config file, and rejects csv files that do not match the config settings for that particular group of diseases.

The output dataset.csv is optimized for use in PowerBI. Once PowerBI is configured to generate surveillance reports from output Epi_Helper data, the user only has to refresh PowerBI after generating dataset.csv for each new surveillance data period moving forward

Epi_helper is designed for 5-year MDSS surveillance reports, and has only been tested on Kent County data.

• Epi_Helper requires python version 3.9.0 or higher.
• The project expects a config.json file in the working directory.
• This project relies on tkinter and is only tested on Windows.