§242u Improving State, Local, and Tribal Information Sharing

Summary

The Secretary can work with State, local, and Tribal public health officials to make it easier to share and use public health data about contagious diseases between the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and those officials. This can include data from health care providers and facilities, public and clinical labs, health information exchanges and networks, and State, local, and Tribal health departments. The Secretary must help these officials and other stakeholders by giving plain guidance on what data to collect, how to format it, and how to send it so local and Tribal health departments can use it. Data should be deidentified when appropriate and must follow the standards the Secretary set under section 300jj–14. The Secretary must try to limit shared data to the minimum needed. The CDC Director may keep such data from public release under section 552(b)(3) of title 5 if a person is identified or if current scientific or statistical methods show there is even a very small risk that the identity could be figured out.