investments in emergency preparedness. Priorities Priorities include working with public health and healthcare partners to sustain and strengthen public health expertise and practice and to advance workforce development and training, ensuring that core capacities are not eroded due to economic or other constraints. An important component of these activities is documenting and communicating the value, effectiveness, and impact of core public health activities. Activities to modernize infectious disease capacities nationwide also support ongoing efforts to improve performance of state and local health departments (e.g., national voluntary accreditation activities); to instill a culture of continuous program improvement across all activities; and to help build staff capacity for implementing, monitoring, and evaluating disease prevention and control programs. Priority1A. Modernize infectious disease surveillance to drive public health action The collection and analysis of disease information provides data for action—essential information for reducing disease and controlling outbreaks. Infectious disease surveillance data help to identify areas and populations at increased risk for infection, improving our ability to direct and prioritize public health interventions. Surveillance data are also required to monitor the effectiveness, timeliness, and cost‐effectiveness of current prevention and control efforts and to identify gaps and new prevention strategies. 8 | CDC ID Framework CDC and public health partners are working with the healthcare community—including clinicians, hospitals, clinical laboratories, healthcare organizations, and provider‐based sentinel networks—to modernize infectious disease surveillance at the federal, state, and local levels. The aim is to increase the quality and reduce the costs of public health and healthcare, taking full advantage of IT tools, electronic networks, and other advancements that make disease surveillance faster, more sensitive, and less expensive—reducing illness and saving lives. As an example, electronically collected and transmitted data from the Gonococcal Isolate Surveillance Project (GISP), a CDC‐supported surveillance system that monitors antimicrobial susceptibilities in Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolates obtained at dozens of sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics in the United States, led to changes in treatment guidelines in 2007 after showing high levels of fluoroquinolone resistance (4). More recently, data from GISP have identified decreasing cephalosporin susceptibility among gonococcal isolates (5)—critical information for healthcare providers and health departments. Key activities to modernize infectious disease surveillance include • Improving collection and communication of timely, accurate, and complete surveillance data to drive effective public health action • Advancing meaningful public health use of electronic health records for infectious disease surveillance and other health purposes (e.g., monitoring immunization coverage, safety, and effectiveness) • Strengthening laboratory-based disease surveillance nationwide by advancing partnerships, policies and incentives, and training that enhance capacity of clinical laboratories to test for microbes of public health concern, including drug-resistant microbes • Intensifying surveillance for unusual health events, including emerging zoonotic and vectorborne diseases and intentionally caused outbreaks, through strategies such as - Integrating public health data with animal health data (e.g., from the U.S. Department of Agriculture [USDA]) and intelligence data (e.g., from the Department of Homeland Security [DHS]), as described in the National Biosurveillance Strategy for Human Health (6) - Analyzing health data on travelers from multiple sources (e.g., GeoSentinel, HealthMap) • Using evolving health IT tools to provide rapid feedback and alerts to hospitals, clinicians, patients, and public health practitioners, based on timely and accurate surveillance data, e.g., - Providing feedback to hospital administrators and public health officials on the efficacy (and cost-effectiveness) of infectious disease prevention practices (e.g., for the prevention of HAIs and drug resistance) - Alerting physicians to local epidemics and communicating prevention and treatment updates - Alerting patients at risk for severe infection during local infectious disease outbreaks and communicating information to protect their health. CDC and public health partners are working with the healthcare community . . . to modernize infectious disease surveillance at the federal, state, and local levels. The aim is to increase the quality and reduce the costs of public health and healthcare, taking full advantage of IT tools, electronic networks, and other advancements that make disease surveillance faster, more sensitive, and less expensive— reducing illness and saving lives. October 2011 | 9 Priority 1B. Expand the role of public health and clinical laboratories in disease control and prevention Diagnostic testing to detect and characterize infectious pathogens is an integral component of day‐ to‐day responsibilities at public health and clinical laboratories and the essential means of identifying the causative agents of outbreaks. When those agents are rare or unknown, states and localities often work