HHS supports strategies to strengthen surveillance, epidemiology, and laboratory capacity to understand and equitably address diseases and health conditions. HHS is focused on expanding capacity to improve laboratory safety and quality, monitor conditions, understanding the needs of various sub-groups of people, and establishing the pipeline for future professionals. HHS is working to modernize surveillance systems for timeliness, accuracy, and analytic reporting while engaging and learning from partners and stakeholders to inform improvements and innovation. Below is a selection of strategies HHS is implementing.
In the context of HHS, this Strategic Plan adopts the definition of underserved populations listed in Executive Order 13985: Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government to refer to “populations sharing a particular characteristic, as well as geographic communities, who have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life”; this definition includes individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality. Individuals may belong to more than one underserved community and face intersecting barriers.
Contributing OpDivs and StaffDivs
CDC, FDA, IHS, OASH, NIH, OGA, and SAMHSA work to achieve this objective.
Strategies
Expand capacity to improve laboratory safety and quality, detect and prevent public health threats, monitor health conditions, understand the unique needs of various sub-groups of persons, and establish the pipeline for future professionals
- Advance the development and use of standards, guidelines, and regulations to improve the quality of laboratory testing and public health data collection.
- Leverage existing surveillance efforts to better understand the unique and common needs of various sub-groups of persons by race, ethnicity, national origin (including primary language), sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, education status, income, and other population characteristics.
- Improve capacity for advanced laboratory, epidemiologic, and environmental methods across federal and state agencies to enhance the detection of potential violations throughout the full lifecycle of HHS-regulated products to ensure only safe and effective products reach the public.
- Identify and assess adverse events related to the use of regulated human and animal medical products, including the development and more effective use of large nationally representative database systems, electronic health records, common data models, and natural language processing.
- Build expertise in cutting edge laboratory, surveillance, and epidemiology techniques to address public health threats and disease conditions, including harmful chemical exposures and diseases, antimicrobial resistance pathogens and other emerging pathogens, healthcare-associated infections, chronic diseases that disproportionately affect specific populations (e.g. sickle cell disease), individuals with disabilities, maternal health, and behavioral health.
- Train and sustain a pipeline of surveillance, epidemiology, laboratory professionals to address current and emerging needs and strengthen connections with clinical workforce development stakeholders.
Modernize surveillance systems for timeliness, accuracy, and analytic reporting
- Accelerate the development and implementation of technological solutions, tools, and approaches to optimize information, knowledge, and data management, standardization, and quality, while ensuring the protection of personally identifiable information and other privacy concerns and minimizing threats to information security.
- Develop and introduce data standards for geographic information within the notifiable diseases reporting system to scales that are meaningful for assessment of socio-ecologic factors.
- Promote completeness and accuracy of race and ethnicity variables and other population characteristics—including age, disability status, geographic area, socioeconomic status, national origin (including primary language), and sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and pregnancy—in laboratory data and data submitted for surveillance purposes in order to better explain the burden of disease and health conditions in diverse populations.
- Partner across HHS agencies to utilize nationally collected data to create customized surveillance reports to address the incidence of infectious disease in underserved populations.
- Provide actionable information for public health officials, policy makers, and regulators to establish and evaluate exposure and disease interventions within disproportionately affected communities or populations.
Engage and learn from partners and stakeholders to inform improvements and innovation
- Strengthen state, federal, international, and public health partnership data and information sharing to improve surveillance and laboratory capacity to identify and better control threats to public health.
- Collaborate with domestic and international partners to develop innovative surveillance, epidemiological, and laboratory approaches that improve situational awareness and communication before, during, and after emergencies and disasters, including food and medical emergencies.
- Identify and address barriers to participation of underserved populations in epidemiologic studies and enhance use of community-based participatory research to ensure studies are meaningful and beneficial to participants
