CDC Celebrates Data Strategy Milestones, Eyes Future Goals

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to meet milestones within the public health data strategy, said Acting Deputy Director of the Management and Operations in the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology Sue Lin at the Women Tech Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C.

“There’s 15 milestones … 12 of the milestones have been met already,” Lin said. “We’re mobilizing our entire office, cross centers and CDC across federal sectors as well as our state, local and tribal jurisdictions to harness that effort of data modernization ahead.”

The CDC works with stakeholders and those in the field to ensure there is continuous quality improvement. Following the COVID-19 pandemic, Lin said the CDC must move quickly and efficiently to see more success.

“This interoperability piece is incredibly, incredibly important to me. To improve the population health outcome of the communities that I care about most, it’s about getting that information in a really efficient, effective way,” Lin said. “We’re laser-focused on that component and how that information can feed into the public health surveillance systems moving forward.”

Lin said when she joined the office in December, she made it a priority to educate her team on the resources used for data modernization. From this, Lin said she has been inspired to seek traditional and nontraditional ways of collaborating with CDC stakeholders.

“We want to be open to hearing the ideas from the field that we can then take back to think about our work in a different way,” Lin said. “[As a leader] you have to be able to move the operations, move the workforce, and then the resources have to also support the effort.”

As the CDC continues to work toward its milestones, concrete deliverables will be provided to show progress. Lin said the agency will also recruit more technology talent as it evolves and uses more technology solutions.

“We greatly value and have been recruiting continuously tech talent into CDC to be able to come in and give us the most innovative solutions and bring that technology know-how into public health agency that hadn’t had access to that talent before,” Lin said.