2015 CDC Surveillance Strategy Innovation Project Awards Announced

Center	Submitted	Awarded

In support of the surveillance strategy, CDC's Office of Public Health Scientific Services (OPHSS) dedicated a small amount of funding and solicited project submissions for innovative projects that addressed one or more challenges faced by programs across the agency. The goal of these projects and the overall portfolio is to foster and promote innovation through enabling small project experiments to answer challenges in surveillance and informatics where their results have potential positive impact across multiple surveillance systems.

Continuing on the process established in 2014 that resulted in funding for 9 projects, the CHIIC identified six priority areas to support the surveillance strategy in 2015:

• Interoperability & Reusability
• Analysis & Visualization
• Standardization & Vocabulary
• Data Access & Open Data
• Privacy & Security
• Data Collection

We received a diverse set of proposals from across the agency addressing HealthIT and non-HealthIT challenges. Each proposed project describes a specific surveillance challenge or question and proposes a small, short method to build, test or experiment to create validated learning toward helping the immediate challenge as well as connecting to other activities across CDC. OPHSS has a small overall portfolio budget for 2015 and is able to sponsor five projects. Should additional funding become available through 2015, additional projects may be funded.

Center	Submitted	Awarded
	4
CGH	1
NIOSH	2
OPHPR	1
OID	12	3
NCEZID	9	2
NCHHSTP	3	1
ONDIEH	6	2
NCCDPHP	3	1
NCIPC	3	1
OPHSS	3
NCHS	1
CSELS	2
Grand Total	25	5

 

To give you a sense of the diversity of the projects submitted, this word cloud shows the keywords associated with each of the submitted project ideas.

Through an expert review and recommendation to the OPHSS Director, we were able to support five projects as part of our 2015 portfolio (in no particular order):

• U.S.-Mexico Border Early Warning Disease Surveillance for Dengue and Chikungunya (NCEZID); Keywords: Participatory surveillance, Dengue, Chikungunya
• Exploring Practice-Level Analytic Solutions for Smaller Health Care Practices that Support Population-Level Analytics (NCCDPHP); Keywords: Population health management, Electronic Health Record
• Proof of Concept and Technology for Hosting Bio-Surveillance Systems in the Amazon Infrastructure Cloud (NCHHSTP); Keywords: Outbreak, Surveillance, NGS, Cloud, HPC, Scalability
• Create and Pilot a FHIR Vocabulary Server (NCEZID); Keywords: Vocabulary, FHIR, Standardization, Authoring, API
• Leveraging EIP Framework for Opioid Overdose (NCIPC); Keywords: EIP, Opioid, Overdose

I look forward to seeing what these projects learn and develop and will post updates with their lessons learned and results as each project completes

With permission from each of the funded projects, specific details will be shared in the near future on http://www.phconnect.org/group/chiic/page/surveillance-innovation-p.... Some projects ideas that did not receive funding have agreed to share their idea to help others who may be interested in this area. From the 2014 projects, these project descriptions have helped others within public health (inside and outside of CDC) improve data collection and improve visualization by referencing the project ideas posted here.

Some initial analysis of the funded projects shows four challenging themes that are addressed in different ways within each of the five projects that reflect a need in multiple projects and surveillance systems within CDC and with our public health partners. The results from these projects will help other surveillance programs and systems interested in EHR, Cloud, APIs and Interoperability.

 

This second year of the Surveillance Strategy Innovation Projects sponsors a total set of 14 interesting and innovative projects and highlights 58 total project ideas from within public health.