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Expert Testimonial
Public health surveillance saves thousands of lives every year in
the United States. We have the potential to save even more lives
and to better and more effectively detect and prevent the spread of
diseases, with the implementation of a fully integrated, interoperable, secure
electronic public health surveillance system.
Public health surveillance has been called the cornerstone of public health
practice and a critical function and responsibility of the entire health care
Walter G. Suarez, ecosystem. Spanning from federal, state, and local public health agencies
to health care providers, clinical laboratories, health plans, social service
MD, MPH agencies, and others, its primary purposes could not be more important to
Executive Director, society at large: actively monitor and serve as an early warning system to
Health IT Strategy and Policy detect diseases when and where they occur; stop diseases from spreading;
Kaiser Permanente track effectiveness and impact of interventions; inform and respond to
shifting public health priorities; and ultimately keep people healthy.
In today’s rapidly evolving digital economy, the foundational principles of
public health surveillance—continuous, systematic collection, analysis
and interpretation of health-related data for planning, implementing
and evaluating public health actions—remain unchanged. What is
undergoing a fundamental transformation is how public health surveillance
is achieved.
Twenty years ago, at the dawn of the information technology era, most health
care and public health activities relied on paper, phones, faxes, and manual
processes. Today, when we are at the brink of what some have called the
Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are building on information technology
advances to improve the speed, accuracy, reliability, effectiveness and
interoperability of health information collected and used in public health
surveillance.
Significant progress has been made in the past 15 years to improve the
nation’s public health surveillance systems, and more changes are needed to
achieve the vision of a seamless, integrated, interoperable electronic public
health surveillance system for the nation. Among them:
• Timeliness: be able to collect surveillance data in real or near-real
time;
• Data Quality: ensure data being captured and collected is as complete
and reliable as possible;
• Structured Data: strive to capture data that is structured for
automated handling;
The Public Health Enterprise 22
