Surveillance Strategy Report — How Sharing Advances Surveillance,

Technology Trims Tasks and Time
Download and print the full Surveillance Strategy: Public Health Surveillance: Preparing for the Future [PDF – 40 Pages, 15.8 MB].
CDC is revolutionizing the way public health gets, transfers, and uses data. Currently, busy state health departments that track and report illness, injuries, and outbreaks must submit information to more than 100 different CDC surveillance systems and programs. The Surveillance Data Platform will enable health departments to send data to one place. A shared information technology service, working behind the scenes, will automatically examine data and securely send it to the correct CDC programs.
Public health surveillance relies on information collected by more than 3,000 federal, state, and local agency partners. Data are submitted from states to CDC programs in many ways through numerous systems, increasing the workload of state and local public health staff. CDC is developing shared surveillance tools that can be plugged into multiple surveillance systems to improve efficiency.
“We want to advance public health’s critical data infrastructure and pipeline. We are moving from dirt roads to a superhighway to exchange data between partners and CDC.”
— Teresa Kinley, MSCS
Lead, Surveillance Data Platform, CDC

People
Improving efficiency at CDC benefits federal, state, and local public health experts

Process
Streamlining data submission and routing eliminates redundant tasks and reduces workload

Technology
Building shared disease surveillance services ensures rapid deployment and on-demand scalability
Putting Data to Work: A New Solution on the Horizon
CDC is implementing cutting-edge technology and applying industry standards to critical public health challenges—from infectious diseases to chronic health conditions. The Surveillance Data Platform benefits the people, processes, and technology that inform and support our nation’s public health system. The new platform is being released in stages beginning in 2017.
The streamlined shared services being developed as part of CDC’s strategy to improve surveillance data will transform data collection, sharing, and use

Newer

Faster

Smarter

Better
Moving the Dial: Reduced Redundancy, Improved Efficiency
2014
CDC launches
Surveillance
Strategy
2016
January: CDC leaders agree to develop shared surveillance services to increase efficiency
May: 16 design principles and 28 service priorities selected
September: Design sessions conducted with external stakeholders
2017
June: Cloud security set
up for new container
technology
July: First shared service—
vocabulary—is
launched
August: Second shared
service—content-based
routing—is launched
2018
Surveillance
Data Platform
continues
onboarding
Katie Fullerton, MPH
Surveillance provides opportunities to standardize, harmonize, and streamline data to inform public health responses.
Keywords: notifiable disease, outbreak