The intent of the General Assembly is to establish and maintain an autism surveillance system and registry for the State.
Responsibility for establishing and maintaining the system and registry is delegated to the Department of Health and Social Services, along with the authority to exercise certain powers to implement the system and registry. To ensure an accurate and continuing source of data concerning autism, the General Assembly by this subchapter requires certain health-care practitioners and all hospitals and clinical laboratories to make available to the Department of Health and Social services information contained in the medical records of patients who have a suspected or confirmed autism diagnosis. All confirmed autism shall be classified and coded using the medically recognized system of International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM), as well as the 6-digit modified British Pediatric Association system (BPA/ICD-9), and all subsequent revisions to these publications which are used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is intended that the product of these efforts will be a central data bank of accurate, precise and current information regarding all autism diagnosed or treated, or both, in this State.