Surveillance Strategy Report — When Informatics Promotes Innovation
Creative Solutions to Public Health Surveillance
Download and print the full Surveillance Strategy: Public Health Surveillance: Preparing for the Future [PDF – 40 Pages, 15.8 MB].
To improve timeliness and accuracy of data collection, we need forums like CDC Health Information Innovation Consortium (CHIIC) that foster creative solutions to public health challenges. Since 2014, CHIIC projects have driven informatics advances in cancer control, reporting of stroke cases, and tracking antibiotic resistance in foodborne pathogens.
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, funds select informatics and health information technology (HIT) projects, makes them available as reproducible tools and models, and shares lessons widely. It also helps CDC stay well-informed about current national HIT standards and policies.
“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
Chief Public Heath Informatics Officer
Office of Public Health Scientific Services, CDC
Many of the tools from these projects can be reused or extended to other surveillance systems or activities. They are paving the way for greater interoperability within the agency and beyond. CHIIC’s priority areas include:
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