New $255M federal grant will help state, local public health agencies modernize data systems
Reza Estakhrian via Getty Images
The program looks to improve data sharing infrastructure and processes for public health agencies to better detect and manage health threats.
Coping with future public health threats means more state and local agencies—many of which rely on aging infrastructure and still collect data by faxes and manual entry—must modernize their data systems, experts say.
To do that, a new $255 million federal program will support state, local and tribal governments’ data modernization projects by offering them technical assistance, policy and legal advice, and guidance documents, among other resources. Funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Data Modernization Implementation Center program will help develop robust and secure data exchanges among public health agencies, said Jennifer Layden, director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance and Technology.
“Public health has a responsibility to detect health threats or diseases that warrant immediate action … to identify outbreaks and then work to investigate and shut down that outbreak,” Layden said. And that, she continued, “relies on timely data.”
The Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, or ASTHO, the National Network of Public Health Institutes and the Public Health Accreditation Board are partnering to oversee the program. They selected three organizations to serve as program centers: CRISP Shared Services, a regional health information exchange; Guidehouse, a consulting firm; and Mathematica, a policy research firm.
The centers will support the adoption of “modern technology to have more seamless, real-time and higher quality” data sharing among health agencies, the private health care sector, laboratories and other stakeholders, Layden said. Participating agencies will receive assistance in, for instance, developing infrastructure that supports electronic case reporting or automatic data exchange between health care facilities and public health agencies.
The program centers will also help agencies adopt the latest health information technology standards and participate in data exchange networks like the nationwide Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, a framework that aims to establish a national data sharing policy and technical approach, said Tabatha Offutt-Powell, vice president of public health data modernization at ASTHO.
Later this year, program leaders plan to launch a data modernization center for tribal governments. Tribal agencies will receive additional support, such as help with establishing data governance policies. “We want to ensure that we’re … not just bringing technical solutions,” Layden said, “but understanding the unique challenges or complexities that tribal nationals may be facing.”
Details on how public health agencies can apply are forthcoming, Offutt-Powell said, but program leaders plan to accept expression-of-interest forms in which agencies must outline the outcomes they hope to achieve through the program, their specific needs to meet those goals and previous data modernization efforts they have undertaken.
The program is taking “an agile approach,” she said, as “we want to meet health departments where they’re at … and really evolve with them.”
NEXT STORY: States are enacting school cellphone bans. Here’s what that looks like.