Office of the Director – Who We Are

We oversee CDC’s Surveillance Strategy as an agency priority. This cross-agency effort responds to requests from multiple stakeholders, including Congress, state public health leaders, and federal advisory committees asking for the development of a new surveillance strategy. This step-wise approach is improving the technology and value of our health information, beginning with states.

• Conceived in 2014, initial goals aimed at improving the availability and timeliness of data while reducing the burden on state and local health departments.
• Through the strategy, steady progress has been made at CDC in advancing systems and participation, and sets the stage for the next wave of improvements. Select examples of initial impacts include faster reporting of mortality records to know how people are dying and from what; reduced burden on states for reporting notifiable disease conditions; better and faster situational awareness through tracking emergency department visits nationally; more timely reporting of laboratory results through improved electronic submission; and better connectivity with the medical community through electronic case reporting eCR.

We bring experts together to solve problems and create innovative solutions to advance the fields of public health data, statistics, informatics, surveillance, epidemiology, laboratory practices, and workforce development.

• The CDC Deputy Director for Public Health Scientific Services chairs the CDC Surveillance Leadership Board, which is accountable to the CDC director. The board reviews, guides, and oversees the evolution of CDC surveillance systems to optimize resource investments devoted to existing and emerging surveillance systems.
• Every CDC Center, Institute, and Office (CIO) participates on the board. Workgroups across the agency have been established to drive select priorities from standardizing data elements across surveillance systems to reducing costs.

As part of CDC’s Surveillance Strategy, we launched a consortium for fostering and sharing creative solutions to surveillance challenges that are unique to public health.

• Since the strategy’s inception in 2014, every CIO at CDC has participated in this forum with direct involvement by 94 different CDC groups and programs and about 30 outside organizations.
• Examples of projects include, reducing data collection burden on healthcare providers to deliver surveillance data, studying early warning systems for disease transmission along national borders, developing an App to report stroke cases, and developing new ways track antibiotic resistance in foodborne pathogens.

To modernize information technology supporting disease tracking and control, we initiated a Surveillance Data Platform with a set of core shared services within CDC. Launched in 2016 as an outcome of CDC’s Surveillance Strategy, this platform is dedicated to making disease tracking more efficient through the use of cloud-based technology. The platform is a multi-phase initiative with the first set of shared services scheduled to be released in 2017. When the platform is fully realized in 2020 it will reduce the number of different ways CDC asks for the same type of information from health departments, and as a result, decrease the burden on partners to send and use data.

As a cross-cutting office, we’re interested in new advances, such as the use of big data and the new field of visual analytics. We work at the forefront of promoting advanced visualizations and visual analytics to improve decision making around public health.

• As part of this effort, we identified a traveling exhibit, Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, curated by the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University and worked to bring it to the David J. Sencer CDC Museum. Alongside the exhibit we organized lectures and trainings to help CDC managers develop visualizations to improve decision making in their own program areas.

We identify approaches for increasing the use of electronic health records (EHRs) as part of an integrated strategy to improve reporting from both clinicians and public health practitioners and better link information that can be used by multiple users.

• With the proliferation of disease outbreaks and the need for fast access to patient health data, EHRs are critical to successful management of patient care. Hospitals and health professionals need information in electronic format that is available quickly to make well-coordinated clinical decisions that improve overall health.
• With healthcare adoption of EHR, interoperability between public health and healthcare is essential for public health surveillance. We are working with the Digital Bridge Initiative, bringing together public health, health IT developers and health systems in a multi-jurisdictional approach to electronic case reporting (eCR). This is a valuable tool that reduces the burden of public health reporting of infectious diseases, while improving the timeliness, accuracy, and completeness of data. Early detection of cases allows for earlier intervention, diminished transmission of disease, and improved detection of outbreaks.
• We are using the HL7 data standards such as Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) and Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) as potential solutions for exchanging healthcare data electronically.

We work at the intersection of public health and healthcare, namely in clinical guidelines, clinical decision support, and clinical quality measures, driving a cross-agency approach.

• Much can be gained by reducing the time it takes to apply clinical guidelines in patient care and identifying public health data to support measures to improve clinical quality. We are working with CDC programs to solve problems that stand in the way of progress. A first step is by applying new methods for more collaborative decision making and continuous improvement that work across multiple stakeholders. Learn more >>

We study and assess CDC’s investments by identifying and categorizing CDC’s surveillance landscape, examining our workforce and support to partners, and tracking these resources over time.

• The agency hosts multiple surveillance systems that span a spectrum of health conditions and risks factors that fall into four broad categories: infectious diseases; non-infectious health conditions; both infectious and non-infectious health conditions; and risk factors and exposures. The majority of CDC resources go to state and local health departments.
• We are in the process of assessing CDC’s surveillance-related workforce as well as grants going to state and local health departments. This information will help us identify and fill gaps in the skills needed to modernize surveillance systems. These analyses will also serve as a guide to better target surveillance resources and create efficiencies without losing quality.

We track hard to solve public health problems, like disparities in rural health affecting the 15% of all Americans who live in rural areas.

• We have overseen the creation of the first-ever MMWR Rural Health Series, coordinating with experts committed to studying health effects of this important population. We have expanded the reach of this series by collaborating with other federal agencies, participating in national webinars and conferences, and fostering relationships with other journals that are publishing commentaries linked to the articles in the series.