Lab Matters Fall 2025 | Page 35

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH | INFORMATICS

Looking Ahead

The CTCWG continues to explore new ways to connect with APHL programs to support the chemical threat workforce. The group intends to refine its suite of practical resources to enhance mechanisms for sharing knowledge and foster collaborative opportunities. Maintaining a focus on user-centered tools, flexible training approaches and sustained peer engagement strengthens workforce development, outreach efforts and preparedness. In this manner, APHL fulfills its commitment to ensuring that public health laboratories are equipped— both in expertise and networks— to address chemical threats with confidence. g will help identify and develop tools, best practices and position statements to help laboratories assess their technological capabilities and infrastructure needs, identify areas for improvement and plan a modernization strategy.

The subcommittee is excited to amplify the story of the UDHHS enterprise assessment and their collaboration with their public health laboratory. UDHHS did the assessment internally, and their methodologies can be a model for other organizations. The UDHHS assessment process— conducted in-house and informed by real-time insights of agency staff— offers a replicable, cost-conscious roadmap that other public health agencies can use to launch their own modernization journeys. And the findings and recommendations in UDHHS’ s report are useful starting points for any public health laboratory. The subcommittee hopes to share stories like this across member laboratories and to support them on their modernization journeys. g development and processing will take place on AIMS instead of in 65 different jurisdictions, thus cutting costs and overhead. Similarly, AIMS has multiple pilot laboratories and healthcare organizations in production with ETOR and is positioned to scale this service nationally. These shared services benefit the entire digital health ecosystem, improve public health outcomes and allow healthcare to focus on patient care rather than reporting requirements.

APHL is also expanding public / private partnerships with clinical laboratories to help them meet public health reporting requirements with minimal effort and overhead using AIMS; and APHL is exploring creative approaches to automated reporting on performancebased metrics like data quality and completeness for ELR and eCR. In the past six months, optimization efforts have led to a 30 % decrease in monthly AWS infrastructure costs, with further process improvements in the works.

Through AIMS, the infrastructure is available to scale these solutions and to collaborate with TEFCA partners like eHealth Exchange to enrich and broaden the public health data that is flowing, and to take advantage of new interoperability and technology. The future is not just about keeping up; it is about shaping what’ s next. APHL and AIMS are leading public health data exchange into the future, and public health should be a key TEFCA partner, with representation in governance, standard setting and infrastructure strategy.

APHL’ s comments in response to the CMS / ASTP RFI can be found on our Policy Engagement space on Confluence. g