Page 15 - Driving Public Health in the Fast Lane

“CDC is dedicated to unlocking the full potential of data for disease
detection, prevention, and elimination. For over 70 years, CDC has used

the best available science and data to make public health decisions. We
must continue to be bold and innovative to eliminate disease, protect

Americans from health threats, and improve the human condition.”

Robert R. Redfield, MD
Director, CDC and Administrator, ATSDR

Lack of interoperability between data systems, reliance on manual, paper-based methods of data sharing,
and a siloed approach to public health surveillance slow responses to significant public health threats,
allowing diseases to spread and delaying detection of health conditions.

Interoperability is critical to the public health data superhighway because it allows different technology
systems and software within and across organizational boundaries to communicate, exchange
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information, and use data in a coordinated manner. This would allow coordinated and comparable data
exchange, eliminating the need to create hundreds of individual surveillance systems for each disease and
enabling state, territorial, local, and tribal jurisdictions to exchange any public health data seamlessly
between each other and with CDC.

This enterprise approach is crucial to the future of public health surveillance because the public health
data superhighway will:

• Inform decision-making by providing access to data sources that are currently unavailable or
burdensome to retrieve;
• Enable coordinated responses to emerging public health threats without developing multiple
stand-alone systems specific to 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, state, territorial, local, and tribal public health needs;
• Establish effective security and privacy protections to limit data breaches.

7 What is Interoperability? himss.org. https://www.himss.org/library/interoperability-standards/what-is. Accessed April 23, 2019.

The Public Health Enterprise 15