CDC Health Information Innovation Consortium (CHIIC)

Informatics Promoting Innovation Creative Solutions to Public Health Surveillance

CDC Health Information Innovation Consortium (CHIIC): 2014-2018

To improve surveillance and advance our mission, CDC created a forum for innovation to stimulate and test new approaches to traditional public health surveillance. The forum, CHIIC, served as a channel for innovative projects in CDC programs and collaborated with State, Tribal, Local, and Territorial agencies. CHIIC funded select informatics and health information technology (HIT) projects, made them available as reproducible tools and models, and shared lessons widely. It also helped CDC stay well-informed about current national HIT standards and policies.

Why It Matters

To improve timeliness and accuracy of data collection, we need forums like CHIIC that foster creative solutions to public health challenges. From 2014-2018, CHIIC projects drove informatics advances in cancer control, reporting of stroke cases, and tracking antibiotic resistance in foodborne pathogens. Many of the tools from these projects could be reused or extended to other surveillance systems or activities. They have paved the way for greater interoperability within the agency and beyond. CHIIC’s priority areas included:

  • Shared services, interoperability, and application programming interfaces (API)
  • Collaboration and communication tools and processes
  • Data management, analysis, and visualization
  • Emerging data and HIT standards
  • Privacy and security
  • Decision support, algorithms, and machine learning

“What is most important about technical innovations and use cases for CDC is that they are enterprise-wide and can be adopted by different programs. Interoperability must start within CDC.”

— Brian Lee, MPH
Senior Advisor (Informatics)
Office of the Director, CDC