Standards Management and Harmonization

CDC programs and state, tribal, local and territorial (STLT) health departments collect epidemiologically important data to monitor health conditions, support research, and drive public health response. However, different programs collect data on the same information using different terminology and representations. This unnecessary diversity makes it more difficult to use data in surveillance and increases the reporting burden of public health partners, who must collect slightly different information and/or spend additional effort converting the same information to various formats for multiple program areas at CDC. Standards management and data harmonization activities can address these issues.

Standards management and data harmonization can increase efficiency across stages in the surveillance data life cycle. It reduces the data processing burden and missed data analysis opportunities caused by unnecessarily incomparable data. Data harmonization can enable CDC programs to drive public health action by efficiently standing up data collection, transforming data, and analyzing and combining data sets (when appropriate) to conduct innovative research, interpret data, and share insight with partners.

This space shares documentation to support standards management and harmonization efforts at CDC.