2016 CDC Surveillance Strategy Innovation Project Awards Announced

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 areas and systems.

The CHIIC identified six priority areas to support the surveillance strategy in 2016:

1. Shared Services, Interoperability, and Application Programming Interfaces (API);
2. Collaboration and Communication Tools and Process;
3. Data Management, Analysis and Visualization;
4. Emerging Data and Health IT Standards;
5. Privacy and Security and/or
6. Decision Support, Algorithms, and Machine Learning

We received a diverse set of proposals from nine centers across the agency addressing HealthIT and non-HealthIT challenges. Each proposed project describes a specific surveillance challenge or question and proposes to build, test or experiment to create validated learning toward helping the immediate challenge as well as connecting to other public health activities within and outside of CDC. OPHSS is able to sponsor two projects for FY2016. Should additional funding become available through 2016, additional projects may be funded.

2016 project proposals submitted by CIO

CIO	# of Proposals	# Awarded
CGH	3
CGH	3
OID	5	1
NCEZID	1
NCHHSTP	3	1
NCIRD	1
ONDIEH	12	1
NCBDDD	3
NCCDPHP	6	1
NCIPC	1
NCEH/ATSDR	2
OPHSS	2
NCHS	2
Grand Total	22	2

 

 

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 the CHIIC Advisory Group’s review and recommendation to the OPHSS Director, we were able to support two projects as part of our 2016 portfolio (in no particular order):

Project	Keywords	Deputy	Center	PI(s)
A SMART App To Track And Report Stroke Cases To Reduce Readmissions	SMART, HL7, FHIR, EHR, Coverdell, Stroke Registry, Core Data Elements, Technical Standards, API	ONDIEH	NCCDPHP	Arunkumar Srinivasan, Jennifer Foltz
Innovative Surveillance and Assessment Techniques to Inform STD and HIV Prevention Action	HIV, STD/STI, syphilis, men who have sex with men, qualitative data	OID	NCHHSTP	Matthew Hogben

 

With permission from each of the funded projects, specific details will be shared in the near future on CHIIC’s Intranet web site. Some project ideas that did not receive funding have agreed to share their idea to help others who may be interested in this area. Since 2014, 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 elements that are addressed in different ways within each of the two projects: Core Data Elements, Qualitative Data, Apps, and API's. These elements will likely be applicable to multiple projects and surveillance systems within CDC and with our public health partners.

We look forward to seeing what these projects learn and develop and will post updates with their lessons learned and results as each project completes. Please join us for the upcoming CHIIC Quarterly Forum on Tuesday, May 17^th.

Publication date: April 13, 2016