Page 14 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

Building the Interoperable Public Health Data Superhighway

To advance public health and enable timely and accurate exchange of data for all public health programs
at all levels of government for all diseases and conditions, the public health community must modernize
its data systems and implement existing technologies to better protect the public’s health. It is time to
reframe the traditional siloed approach to public health surveillance and adopt a progressive, enterprise-
wide mindset. An enterprise-wide investment to modernize public health surveillance will build an
interoperable core data exchange infrastructure—the “public health data superhighway.”

Effective public health surveillance requires the five core data pillars—or “lanes” of the superhighway—
to seamlessly share data across the public health enterprise. However, the diversity of systems that are
available to exchange data makes this challenging. Within a state, the health department’s data system
may not integrate or interoperate with the health care provider’s system or the laboratory’s system.
Furthermore, a state health department’s data system may not be able to seamlessly share data with
federal partners. As a result, the public health enterprise has been slowed by error-prone, manual, paper-
based data exchange.

Compounding the slow exchange of data, traditional disease and condition-specific approaches to public
health surveillance has resulted in more than 100 separate, disease and condition-specific, stand-alone
surveillance systems at CDC. Data input is not standardized across the agency, creating a burden on
the public health professionals to keep track of duplicative, non-harmonized, non-standardized data
requirements for each program. 5

“…From the frontlines of the E. coli lettuce outbreak…

public health professionals took pictures of their

computer screens to share via text messages images of

lab reports from implicated food samples identifying the

linkage to human illness. Why? Because key electronic

data systems storing epidemiologic and laboratory data

had no way to seamlessly share the information and

speed the response.” 6

Janet Hamilton, MPH

Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists

5 Office of Public Health Scientific Services. CDC Public Health Surveillance Strategy Report: 2014-2018. cdc.gov. https://www.cdc.gov/surveillance/pdfs/Surveillance-Series-Bookleth.pdf. Published
September 2018.
6 Hamilton, J. FY20 LHHS Testimony Hamilton. Oral. CSTE. https://cste.sharefile.com/share/view/sc5e20318a5a49a1a. Published April 24, 2019.

The Public Health Enterprise 14