2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


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ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

CDC Surveillance Strategy – A Strategy for Improving 
CDC Activities in Public Health Surveillance
Chesley Richards and Brian Lee*

Office of Public Health Scientific Services, CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA

Objective
This presentation aims to share the CDC Surveillance Strategy’s 

goals, initiatives and activities. The surveillance strategy describes 
how CDC will:

� enhance accountability, resource use, workforce and innovation 
for surveillance by establishing a Surveillance Leadership Board, a 
surveillance workforce plan, and an innovation consortium;

� accelerate the utilization of emerging tools and approaches 
to improve the availability, quality, and timeliness of surveillance 
data by establishing enhanced HIT policy engagement, HIT vendor 
forums, and informatics innovation projects; and

� initiate four cross cutting surveillance system initiatives to 
improve surveillance by addressing data availability, system usability, 
redundancies, and incorporation of new information technologies

Introduction
Public health surveillance guides efforts to detect and monitor 

disease and injuries, assess the impact of interventions and assist 
in the management of and recovery from large-scale public health 
incidents. Today’s ever-present, media-hungry environment pressures 
public health scientists, researchers and frontline practitioners to 
provide information, on an almost instantaneous basis, responsive 
to public and policy maker concerns about specific geographies and 
specific populations. Actions informed by surveillance information 
take many forms, such as policy changes, new program interventions, 
public communications and investments in research. Local, state and 
federal public health professionals, government leaders, public health 
partners and the public are dependent on high quality, timely and 
actionable public health surveillance data.

With a charge from the CDC Director, this Surveillance Strategy 
aims to improve CDC’s overall surveillance capabilities, and by 
extension those of the public health system at large. The Strategy 
guides efforts to make essential surveillance systems more adaptable 
to the rapidly changing technology landscape, more versatile in 
meeting demands for expanding knowledge about evolving threats to 
health, and more able to meet the demands for timely and population-
specific and geographically specific surveillance information. The 
Strategy will also facilitate work to consolidate systems, eliminate 
unnecessary redundancies in reporting, and reduce reporting burden.

These expectations compel this strategy and argue for CDC to lead 
the public health system in improving the timeliness and availability, 
as well as the quality and specificity of surveillance data to CDC 
programs, STLT agencies, and other stakeholders.

Methods
To improve surveillance efforts at CDC and to make progress 

on the four strategic goals, CDC will collaborate with principal 
public health surveillance stakeholders, customers, and partners, and 
together will focus efforts to achieve three goals to improve CDC 
health surveillance activities and investments:

� Goal 1 - Enhance the accountability, resource use, workforce and 
innovation for surveillance at CDC and in support of STLT agencies

� Goal 2 - Accelerate the utilization of emerging tools and 
approaches to improve the availability, quality, and timeliness of 
surveillance data

� Goal 3 - Through cross-cutting agency initiatives, improve 
surveillance by addressing data availability, system usability, 
redundancies, and incorporation of new information technologies in 
major systems or activities

Results
To improve surveillance efforts at CDC and to make progress on 

the strategic goals, in 2014 CDC initiated four cross cutting agency 
initiatives aimed at large surveillance systems:

� Initiative 1 - National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System 
(NNDSS) Modernization Initiative

� Initiative 2 - BioSense Enhancement Initiative
� Initiative 3 - Accelerating Electronic Laboratory Reporting
� Initiative 4 - Mortality Surveillance-Related initiatives with the 

National Vital Statistics System

Conclusions
An essential objective and outcome of the board’s leadership in 

implementing these action steps and the entire surveillance strategy 
will be to optimize CDC’s investments in the emerging surveillance 
systems infrastructure through:

� coordination with STLT health departments, health care 
providers, and other partners;

� transparency in decision making for CDC’s surveillance data 
systems;

� harmonization of CDC’s participation in HIT standards 
development and in developing public health reporting functionality 
in EHR systems; and

� assurance that CDC’s future investments in data collection 
systems — including funding that individual CDC programs provide 
to STLT health departments — comply with the new surveillance 
strategy.

Keywords
surveillance; strategy; workforce; informatics; policy

*Brian Lee
    E-mail: fya1@cdc.gov

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 7(1):e49, 2015