At a glance
Key Milestones
Complex threats expose gaps and prompt action
- Partners that public health data are “moving slower than disease”
Epidemics like opioids, suicide, and EVALI challenge public health’s capabilities
Public Health Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) launches with a vision of world class data and analytics
CDC answers the urgent call
- Focus on core surveillance systems improves early warning signals for biggest health threats
- CDC releases to share technology resources and foster innovation
- New IT and Data Governance unifies CDC’s investments in modernization
For the first time, Congress dedicates to support data modernization
Growing support for modernization
- Data standards, such as ®, and new federal policies push modernization forward
- CDC expands data-ready innovation with healthcare, academic, and research partners
- CDC awards first funding to states for data modernization and system interoperability
- DMI lays out a strategic roadmap to guide modernization and evaluation
Volume and velocity of COVID-19 cases quickly overwhelms public health data systems
Answering the pandemic
- Multiple CDC surveillance systems extend ability to track COVID-19
- CDC rapidly onboards health departments to automate transmission of electronic laboratory reports
- Huge leaps in electronic case reporting (eCR) automate real-time information exchange between thousands of healthcare facilities
- Provisional COVID-19 death data and new data on excess deaths informs response
- CDC and federal agencies stand up to track mental, social, and economic health
- CDC integrates data from multiple core surveillance systems into interface
designates $500M to support rapid modernization
Accelerating the strategy
- Accelerated investments and projects increase capacity to rapidly detect and respond to the pandemic
- Assigned Implementation Leads align, coordinate, monitor, and measure progress toward future state
- CDC expands programs for state-of-the-art data science, visualization, and informatics training
- CDC and the pilot pandemic-ready systems at state and local health departments
Congress dedicates $50 million in FY 2021 to continue data modernization activities.
The American Rescue Plan (ARP) Act provides an additional $500 million to CDC to advance surveillance and analytics infrastructure, as well as to establish a forecasting center for emerging biological threats.
Expanding our capabilities
- CDC built an immunization data lake to handle the massive COVID-19 vaccine roll-out and delivery.
- CDC created a cloud-based platform to catalogue, analyze, and publish findings faster than previously possible.
- Ongoing improvements to data collection and sharing improve health equity.
- In August 2021, CDC stands up the new national Center for Epidemic Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics.
- New cloud-based and computational capabilities enable CDC to process millions of unique SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences.
Congress dedicates $100M in FY 2022 and $175M in FY 2023 to modernize public health data surveillance and analytics at CDC and state and local health departments. The FY 2024 President’s Budget Request was over $165M.
CDC’s Moving Forward initiative stands up the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology to lead a first-ever Public Health Data Strategy.
Stories from around the country capture the increasing impacts of transforming data to protect people’s health.
The path to prevention
- Continued modernization ensures an effective and efficient approach to lifesaving prevention and response.