INFORMATICS
Moving to the Cloud Signals a Bright Future
for Public Health Data Exchange
By Jill Sakai, PhD, writer
When the APHL Informatics Messaging
Service (AIMS) platform was created in
2008, it was designed to help public health
laboratories send seasonal influenza data
to the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) to inform surveillance.
“Over the years, AIMS has grown to
be quite a bit more than that,” said
Dari Shirazi, APHL’s manager of health
information technology. “Now not only
do we send messages from one place
to the other, but we also house a lot of
capabilities on AIMS.” Those include
communication portals, electronic
reporting, data validation and even
analysis of whole genome sequencing
data.
These changes have been possible
because of cloud computing, Shirazi
said. The cloud provides access to
shared computing resources in remote
data centers via the Internet, allowing
organizations to tap into data storage
and processing power on demand and
pay just for what they need, when they
need it. “The cloud strategy is all about
trying to use your resources as efficiently
as possible,” he said. For AIMS, turning
to cloud-based services is helping the
platform redefine the roles of public
health laboratories, agencies and APHL in
health data exchange.
Cloud Benefits
Cloud computing can give even relatively
small organizations access to powerful
computing resources without needing
to maintain costly facilities, said Marty
Sibley, MS, a cloud computing specialist
for APHL. The cloud frees a local team
from needing to acquire, maintain and
update servers, and makes it possible to
shift usage up—and, importantly, down—
as demand changes. “You can scale your
organization rapidly with a low cost of
entry,” Sibley said.
22
LAB MATTERS Winter 2020
Someday all 5,500-plus private hospitals and clinics in the US will be
connected to public health agencies via the AIMS platform
Moving AIMS to the cloud in 2014 also
simplified many aspects of security and
maintaining HIPAA and FISMA Moderate
compliance. Data center physical and
environmental controls, for example, are
all managed by the cloud service provider
rather than APHL.
The AIMS team also credits cloud
computing with lowering barriers to
innovation and allowing laboratories
to be more agile when adapting to new
needs. As more public health laboratories
perform next-generation sequencing, for
example, they must grapple with larger
quantities of data. “Using cloud resources,
you can add 1,000 computers to help you
analyze this data very quickly,” Shirazi
said. “Yes, you could buy 1,000 computers
locally and spin them up—but it would
take a lot of resources.”
Bridging Public and Private Sectors
AIMS is now using cloud resources to
expand the traditional boundaries of
public health data exchange. In 2017,
APHL began a private-public collaboration
with Quest Diagnostics and CDC to
establish an approach to validate and
route the company’s electronic laboratory
results (ELR) via the AIMS platform to the
appropriate public health agencies. By late
2019, 91 percent of the 55 public health
agencies were able to receive secure
electronic reportable disease messages
from Quest.
“That particular project was a big turning
point, and it would have been nearly
impossible without cloud computing,”
said Eduardo Gonzalez Loumiet, MBA,
PMP, CPHIMS, CEO of Ruvos, the firm that
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