Page 10 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

Efforts to modernize public health surveillance and data systems have been made over the years, but
the categorical, disease-specific approach to funding and implementing improvements have resulted in
uneven progress. This has created a patchwork of “haves” and “have nots” across systems and jurisdictions,
preventing transformative, cross-cutting, comprehensive upgrades. For example, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) has more than one hundred siloed public health surveillance data systems.
State, territorial, local, and tribal health departments share data with CDC through these systems. Many
of these systems are not interoperable, which results in duplicate and redundant data entry.

Therefore, to transform the nation’s public health surveillance capacity, we must evolve from manual
data sharing methods and disease or condition-specific silos towards building a core public health
data infrastructure—a “public health data superhighway”—that facilitates automatic, interoperable
data exchange. This foundational approach to improvement, or enterprise-wide approach, will
support widespread and rapid access to public health data for all public health programs at all levels
of government for all diseases and conditions. Just like a rising tide lifts all boats, a public health data
superhighway improves all public health programs. Public health needs a coordinated and integrated
approach to using data to deliver on mission, serve the public, and steward resources while respecting
privacy and confidentiality.

The public health data superhighway transformation will:

• Inform decision-making by providing access to data sources that were previously unavailable or
burdensome to retrieve;

• Enable coordinated responses to emerging public health threats without developing multiple
stand-alone systems for specific diseases or conditions;
• Ensure that data systems are interoperable within public health, as well as with external health
care providers;
• Support sophisticated data analytics, thereby allowing public health professionals and
policymakers to make smarter, faster decisions and get ahead of chronic, emerging, and urgent
threats;
• Support federal, territorial, tribal, state, and local public health needs;

• Establish effective security and privacy protections to limit data breaches and minimize their
impact.

This report explores the challenges with data sharing within the current public health surveillance
system and demonstrates the need to create an efficient and modern 21 century public health data
st
superhighway.

According to focus group conversations with public health subject matter experts, key challenges include:

• Manual paper-based methods remain a prominent mode of data exchange;

• Systems improvements to date have been limited to specific programs, resulting in siloed benefits;
• A vast disconnect remains between health care and public health;

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