The National Public Health Data System: The case for an aggregated national healthcare database

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed major gaps in U.S. public health data systems – interfering with the government’s ability to effectively conduct surveillance, outbreak modeling, and research. The lack of complete federal data on chronic diseases has also hindered the ability to achieve major public health goals, such as eliminating health disparities. The challenge centers around the nation’s public health surveillance system requiring standards, organization, and streamlining capable of providing complete, centralized data to inform public health responses.

This whitepaper presents the concept for the Eagle-Pega National Public Health Data System NPHDS, including the federal and commercial data sets to integrate and provide necessary elements needed to aggregate health data on the U.S. population. It reviews the technologies and strategies that could be used for aggregation to achieve a complete database, and discusses data storage and security. It addresses additional services and capabilities that can be gained by leveraging intelligent automation and case management, once a central NPHDS has been achieved.