Public Health Data Strategy Overview

Public Health Data Strategy (PHDS)

• The PHDS aims to improve public health data exchange, increasing speed, quality, and completeness for better community health and response readiness. It learns from past events like COVID-19 and mpox.

Public Health Ecosystem

• The public health ecosystem comprises various partners: federal agencies, the public, healthcare providers (labs, etc.), CDC, national public health partners, healthcare systems, and State and Territorial Local Trunking (STLT) partners.
• It encompasses the interconnected systems, workforce, policies, and technologies used for data collection, management, access, sharing, analysis, and dissemination in public health.
• Data are crucial to identify diseases, threats, disease burden, and facilitating public health actions.
• The PHDS creates an integrated data ecosystem to improve communities and response times.

PHDS and Partner Empowerment

• The PHDS aims to improve access and use of data for different partners:
  • Public: access to information on health emergencies, risks, trends, and resources
  • Healthcare: reduced reporting time and complexity to public health partners
  • STLTs: faster threat detection, reduced reporting burden to federal partners
  • CDC Programs: more effective use of public health data sources; faster detection and action for public health threats
  • Federal Agencies: better alignment of data and technology investments, improved response-readiness through more comprehensive data collection

Core Data Sources

• Core data sources offer a complete picture of community health, enabling:
  • Disease and condition identification
  • Emerging threat detection
  • Understanding disease burden and severity
  • Public health action
• Examples include:
  • Case data: comprehensive disease and condition information, identifying outbreaks, understanding disease burden.
  • Laboratory data: test results, tracking disease trends, identifying outbreaks and exposures.
  • Emergency department data: clinical diagnoses, understanding near real-time trends, detecting emerging threats.
  • Vital statistics data: birth and death data, understanding disease severity and mortality.
  • Immunization data: vaccine doses, calculating vaccination coverage and trends.
  • Healthcare capacity and utilization data: staff, beds, equipment, availability of resources, health system stresses.
  • Wastewater surveillance data: presence of viruses, early warning of virus spread. (non-exhaustive list and may evolve)

Data Modernization

• The PHDS leverages existing CDC data modernization initiatives.
• Current inadequacies include information silos, disconnected systems, disease-specific budgets, skills gaps in utilizing technology, high reporting and data-sharing burdens for providers, inflexible technologies in many health departments, varying data collection and reporting policies, and lack of public health integration in the healthcare data ecosystem.
• The PHDS accelerates modernization by:
  • Prioritizing DMI actions for impact
  • Defining achievable goals impacting public health response capabilities
• It's a continuous, comprehensive, and long-term effort involving CDC, STLTs, other federal agencies, and healthcare partners.

This quiz covers the Public Health Data Strategy (PHDS) and its role in improving data exchange for better community health outcomes. It explores the public health ecosystem, including key partners and the importance of data in identifying health threats. Test your knowledge on the systems and policies involved in public health data management.