The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to modernize the US public health system. Inefficiency remains a hallmark of the system due to two lingering issues: the CDC receives data from multiple sources, and current systems rely on disease-specific monitoring and manual data entry. As a result, it can take weeks or even months to share the data with public health authorities, providers, and the scientific community. The key challenge is to collect and share information more efficiently so that it can be used to shape important public health decisions.
