Who is DIBBs?

Mission

Our mission is to get better, faster data to public health departments so that they can take timely public health action. Our work contributes to CDC's public health data strategy and mission to develop a robust public health data ecosystem.

Vision

By making disparate, complex data sources easier to use and integrate, we reduce manual work and help public health departments devote more time to education, prevention, and improving outcomes for their communities.

How we started

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that the U.S. needs to significantly improve the collection, analysis, and use of public health data. This requires building a secure and scalable data infrastructure to enable timely, complete data sharing for public health action, breaking down silos that keep critical data disconnected, and reducing the burden on jurisdictions for collecting, processing, and reporting data.

In an effort to strengthen the U.S. public health data infrastructure, the CDC launched a multi-year collaboration with the U.S. Digital Service called the Pandemic-Ready Interoperability Modernization Effort (PRIME). The DIBBs team (formerly PHDI) was tasked with developing and providing access to open source, modular software and tooling, known as “Building Blocks,” that public health departments can use to process and transform data.

Our team has partnered with a variety of public health departments to reduce their manual data integration processes and solve public health data challenges. Thus far, our efforts have involved:

• Building a cloud-based data pipeline that comes with a core set of Building Blocks to increase data processing speed, create a single source of truth for incoming data across a wide range of formats (e.g., eCR, ELR, VXU, and ADT), and remove the need for duplicative processes
• Conducting focus groups with public health staff who interact with condition-specific diseases along the data lifecycle (e.g., collection, ingestion, management, analysis, and visualization)
• Integrating Building Blocks into CDC's NBS surveillance system to support jurisdictions in their public health investigation workflows

By developing a modular set of Building Blocks that jurisdictions can easily integrate into existing data systems, our work is helping to create a modern public health data system that works for all diseases and conditions — a system that will enable public health agencies to deliver timely, relevant, and actionable data.