How CDC is Supporting Jurisdictional Public Health Departments

CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative is bringing together state, tribal, local, and territorial (STLT) public health departments to create modern, interoperable, real-time public health data and surveillance systems that will protect the American public. CDC is supporting public health departments’ efforts to modernize three parts of the U.S. public health system:

DATA: Upgrade data systems to talk to each other in real-time and produce high-quality, actionable data.
PEOPLE: Develop a workforce highly skilled in data science capable of upgrading, using, and maintaining these systems and interpret the data.
POLICY: Advance policies that enable CDC, public health departments, and healthcare systems to securely and easily share and access data.

CDC is supporting many ongoing activities to accelerate these efforts in public health departments. These include:

Providing direct funding to build foundational data modernization capacity and implement core data and surveillance modernization activities.

Offering technical assistance that provides experts and resources to support data modernization activities.

Collaborating with national partners to facilitate learning networks and provide opportunities for knowledge and skill development.

CDC in Action: Supporting Public Health Departments

Providing funding to state and local public health departments across the country to support data modernization activities through CDC’s Strengthening U.S. Public Health Infrastructure, Workforce, and Data Systems grant.

These funds will ensure that U.S. public health systems are ready to respond to emergencies, like COVID-19, and meet the evolving and complex needs of the communities and populations they serve.

Assisted public health departments in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and 13 large local jurisdictions with connecting to the electronic case reporting (eCR) infrastructure and receiving COVID-19 electronic case reports.

eCR supports daily surveillance operations of public health departments, enables bi-directional exchange of case report data between healthcare facilities and public health agencies, and decreases the burden of manual case reporting.

Partnering with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists to train 26 teams comprised of 116 participants from public health departments in 2021 through the Data Science Team Training, an annual year-long, on-the-job data science training program.

This program provides public health agency staff data science training to accelerate real-world progress to address priorities of CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative

Provided more than $3 million in data modernization funds to tribal entities over the last two years to enhance tribal data infrastructure by enhancing health information systems, improving data exchange, and building workforce capacity.

CDC will continue to expand efforts to improve tribes’ access to the public health data they need to respond to COVID-19 and build capacity to respond to health challenges facing their communities.

Providing technical assistance to 27 public health departments to assist in developing their data modernization implementation and/or workforce development plan.

This will help jurisdictions use the results of their data modernization assessment to develop a data modernization roadmap that outlines how jurisdictions will accomplish data modernization goals.

Collaborating with the Public Health Informatics Institute to engage staff from 64 public health departments in the Data Modernization Initiative Learning Community, which brings data modernization leads together to engage with peers and share best practices.

This community is designed for participants to learn from their peers through ongoing discuss forums and sharing of materials and successes to support efforts to develop and implement public health departments’ data modernization plans.