Purpose
Guidance and training for staff at local, state, and territorial health departments who submit outbreak reports to CDC through the National Outbreak Reporting System (NORS).
Form and Guidance
Note: For guidance on the reporting process within a particular jurisdiction, contact the site or agency administrator.
Training Materials
These training materials are technical documents designed to assist NORS users with entering, downloading, and reviewing outbreak data.
NORSDirect
NORSDirect is a feature of NORS that enables staff of state, local, and territorial public health departments to upload and manage electronic outbreak data in NORS.
Reporting sites can import data by logging into NORSDirect and selecting an Excel file to upload.
NORSDirect allows multiple outbreak reports to be uploaded into NORS at once. The general flow of information into NORSDirect is as follows:
- Report data are downloaded or pulled from the reporting site's outbreak database.
- Any report data from multiple sources are combined into a single Excel file.
- File is uploaded to NORSDirect.
- Individual reports are extracted from the file and saved to NORS.
- Report data are automatically checked for errors. Errors can be corrected directly in the NORS interface, or by uploading a new file containing the corrected data.
Reporting site administrators (RSAs) and agency administrators can be assigned access to NORSDirect in the user section of NORS. RSAs should automatically have access to NORSDirect.
To view NORSDirect, log in to NORS. On the NORS home screen, the "Data Import" tab on the left side panel will take you to the "NORS Direct-Data Import" page.
- Uploaded report data may overwrite or delete data in existing NORS reports.
- Note: Deleted or overwritten data cannot be retrieved.
- Note: Deleted or overwritten data cannot be retrieved.
- If you upload a report that has the same StateID as an existing NORS report, you will overwrite the existing NORS report. NORSDirect matches outbreak reports to existing NORS records for your reporting site based on the StateID variable alone.
- Test files are a good way to learn how to use NORSDirect. All new users are strongly encouraged to submit at least one test file before uploading real outbreak data.
- Include a StateID that begins with "Test" (e.g., Test_LTCF-155) and set the required field DateFirstIll to "1/1/1950" so that the report can be quickly identified.
- After uploading the file, check that the outbreak reports saved as expected, then delete the reports in NORS.
- Include a StateID that begins with "Test" (e.g., Test_LTCF-155) and set the required field DateFirstIll to "1/1/1950" so that the report can be quickly identified.
- NORSDirect supports Excel files up to 4 megabytes.
- Every file must have six required variables for every report: StateID, AgencyName, ReportingState, PrimaryMode, DateFirstIll, EstimatedPrimary.
- Note: For multistate exposure and multistate residency outbreaks, the State# variable is also required.
- Note: For multistate exposure and multistate residency outbreaks, the State# variable is also required.
- Excel files should use the variable names found on the Data Specification page. These should be in the first row. When multiple reports are included in the file, each variable has its own column, with one report per row.
- If splitting data across multiple worksheets in a single Excel workbook, repeat the StateID and AgencyName columns once on each worksheet. Variables should be organized into their designated worksheets, as defined on the Data Specification page.
- Your list values do not have to match NORS if you use the List Value Mapping page to map them to NORS values. Mapped values must be entered prior to upload for NORS to correctly import the data.