Public Health Organizations Implore Congress to Fund Public Health Surveillance Systems

HLN joined more than eighty organizations, institutions and companies in imploring Congress to fund public health surveillance systems. The appropriations request letters – one to the House and one to the Senate – is seeking $1 billion over ten years (and $100 million in FY 2020) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to allow CDC, state, local, tribal, and territorial health departments to move from sluggish, manual, paper-based data collection to seamless, automated, interoperable IT systems and to recruit and retain skilled data scientists to use them.

HLN has been at the forefront of systems development in public health, and has long advocated for the modernization of public health registries and other systems. This initiative is focused on public health surveillance systems, and HLN’s work on the Reportable Condition Knowledge Management System (RCKMS) supports the electronic case reporting (eCR) initiative described in a flyer describing the details of this initiative published by a set of leading public health organizations.

HLN encourages everyone to advocate for these needed funds at every opportunity.

See Congressional testimony by Janet Hamilton of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE).