Yesterday, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officers (ASTHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced their long-awaited Data Modernization Implementation Centers (IC). ASTHO contracted with three vendors to fund and support state, territorial, local, and tribal data modernization projects funded through the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) – a fourth organization to be announced this fall will support a tribal-focused IC.
PHIG is about putting resources on the street to support data modernization. So, along with the ICs, ASTHO and CDC announced the first “wave” of funding for implementation projects within state, territorial, and local public health agencies (tribal agencies will be funded separately once the tribal IC is announced). These awards are up to $750,000 for approximately a year, though they cannot be used to support agency staff. ASTHO’s goal is to fund a range of agencies based on their level of data modernization “maturity” from those agencies just beginning to those well along. We suspect that there will also be some desire to fund projects across the range of agency type (state, territorial, local), but this has not been explicitly indicated.
Projects can involve any of four key domains (People, Process, Governance, and Technology), and successful applications will need to clearly address one of three core IC program outcomes: using the latest health IT standards to exchange data; exchanging data via the Trusted Exchange Framework Common Agreement (TEFCA) network; and documenting and sharing findings and lessons learned from the priority use cases with the broader community involved in public health data exchange. The current priority use cases are electronic case reporting (eCR) and immunization. Note that the focus is on interoperability; projects that relate to modernizing core public health systems (like Immunization Information Systems or Disease Surveillance Systems) may have to focus their applications on the interoperability components of this modernization to be successful.
We suggest that all agencies review the PHIG IC website and listen to the recording of yesterday’s informational webinar when it’s posted. Agencies are encouraged to submit an “Expression of Interest” online by October 15, 2024 with award notification expected quickly by November 4, 2024. This is a good opportunity to begin data modernization activities or to supplement and expand existing m modernization projects. HLN has been involved in Data Modernization Initiative activities for several years and is a PHIG project partner with ASTHO, We stand ready to assist agencies in conceptualizing, applying for, and completing PHIG IC projects.