Healthcare data modernization requires advocacy, funding

Tom Leary, senior vice president and head of Government Relations at HIMSS, and Janet Hamilton, executive director, CSTE, at the HIMSS25 conference in Las Vegas Monday.

Photo: Jeff Lagasse/Healthcare Finance News

LAS VEGAS – Healthcare data needs to be modernized, and any modernization effort needs funding to be viable. Advocacy is critical in this regard, and one advocacy campaign, centering on public health surveillance, has seen success in recent years.

That’s been the focus of the Data: Elemental to Health campaign. The campaign advocates for sustained funding for public health surveillance through the Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with support from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE).

Tom Leary, senior vice president and head of Government Relations at HIMSS, and Janet Hamilton, executive director, CSTE, said at the HIMSS25 conference here Monday that the program has found both success and focus in the five years since its implementation.

HIMSS, the parent company of Healthcare Finance News, has contributed funding to the campaign. 

“We were very fortunate to be able to expand the campaign,” said Hamilton. Data is the backbone of public health surveillance, she said, but with a modern, interoperable system, epidemiologists are left to bridge the gap via sluggish, manual processes. 

A strong public health surveillance system should detect and facilitate an immediate response to emerging health threats, she said.

The campaign’s initial focus areas included quantifying morbidity and mortality. 

“And those were really foundational things,” said Hamilton. “We really focused on disease surveillance, and making sure we had that real-time information available.” 

Workforce is critical, she said. Systems don’t just run on their own – there need to be people behind the systems to make them work. The campaign had been working on some of these areas for some time, but more funding was required to be able to do more. 

The campaign launched shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, at which point HIMSS locked in an annual commitment of more than $36 million – “which is very similar to what we saw with meaningful use,” said Leary. “It’s time for us to push forward.”

A significant amount of funding is required in the future. Hamilton cited the need for billions of dollars in funding to continue with its advocacy mission. 

“What we’re really underscoring here is there’s a disconnect between some of the agencies that historically have gotten incredible funding for health IT advancement and the public health community – which comes hat-in-hand,” said Leary. “It’s critical for the economic viability of the U.S.”

“It’s going to take a long time to articulate the return on investment in these systems,” he said.

Jeff Lagasse is editor of Healthcare Finance News.
Email: jlagasse@himss.org
Healthcare Finance News is a HIMSS Media publication.