Improving public health emergency response with real-time data sharing

In the face of public health emergencies, the need for rapid and accurate data sharing between government agencies becomes crucial. That’s why the federal government established the Tri-Agency Task Force for Emergency Diagnostics in 2019. This tri-agency collaboration is designed to enhance the federal response to public health emergencies by facilitating the rapid development and deployment of diagnostic tests. At the heart of this effort is the availability of real-time, reliable data—and we are helping our clients enable the flow of data between agency systems and modernize the delivery of services.

Challenge

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, public health officials at all levels needed to act swiftly and decisively in an environment that was full of unknowns—and they understood the importance of working together to ensure an effective response. The U.S. government had established a Tri-Agency Task Force to facilitate rapid collaboration in response to public health emergencies, so agencies were able to leverage this partnership to coordinate pandemic response efforts. This partnership is key to ensuring public safety, as each organization has unique capabilities and responsibilities that together offer a fully formed view of how to address public health risks.

Solution

Through the many years of experience and expertise that the various agencies tasked with public health safety each have, there is also the opportunity for continued innovation to expand services and capabilities to ensure sustained benefit to the public. One such innovation is around leveraging technology that will connect various systems in each agency.

ICF is helping government agencies take their interagency partnership to the next level through Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. APIs allow different software applications to communicate with each other, building secure bridges between systems to enable real-time data transfer on a self-serve basis.

Why is this important? Imagine a public health threat, such as a Listeria outbreak. The government has detected a problem and needs to know how many clinical and public health laboratories can test for Listeria and must communicate with those labs to ensure accurate testing, reporting, and referral of specimens. The real-time transfer of data between agencies allows them to correlate public health threats with testing capabilities and can inform which policies to enact in the service of protecting the public.

The foundation of this solution is the Internet Quality Improvement and Evaluation System, or iQIES, a modern cloud-based platform that serves across operations. iQIES eliminates information silos and makes real-time data accessible to users as a single source of truth. More importantly, iQIES allows users to free themselves from dependencies on other systems, especially on when and how those other systems update their data.

Using APIs, the iQIES system allows users to build data sets on a self-serve basis, as well as providing the ability to create automated data updates and reports as defined by each organization using the data. Opening the door to real-time data availability allows organizations to spend more time on determining how they want to use the data rather than spending time and resources on managing various systems responsible for delivering the data.

Secure data sharing is key to effective collaboration, preparation, and response, but it’s also important to make the data easy to understand and use. We are helping our partners modernize the delivery of their services—embracing a cloud-first strategy and modernizing tech stacks, implementing digital workflows, and creating real-time data visualizations, all in the service of reducing the gap in response time and defining what next-gen service looks like.

The streamlining of data-dependent processes via APIs is laying the foundation for a paradigm shift in how we respond to public health emergencies, and empowering health officials to proactively identify potential areas of investigation through predictive analytics in the government's mission to ensure health safety for the American public.

Looking to the future

With a cloud-first, modernized, and connected system in place, we are better prepared to respond to public health emergencies in a coordinated and collaborative manner. In addition to infectious disease outbreaks, real-time data sharing between agencies can help us better manage chronic conditions.

This increased ability to process data and increase its impact extends beyond U.S. borders and can help us track and respond to infectious disease outbreaks that occur anywhere in the world.

Another key benefit to the public and the tri-agency relationship is the security and protection of data. APIs and data exchanges also benefit from the anonymization of data that allows for predictive analytics to get ahead of potential threats to public health. Ensuring the ability to transfer large volumes of data securely, reliably, and quickly, while safeguarding the data's privacy, is a key part of the API initiative being led by our clients.