Elodie Collins
Leidos has completed the migration of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network to the cloud, making a major step forward in the modernization of the infection surveillance system. The company said the milestone will enable the integration of new capabilities to the nearly 20-year-old medical technology.
Digitization of a Government Legacy Health System
Leidos received a $51 million contract from the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases to support and update the NHSN in September. Under the five-year deal, Reston, Virginia-based technology company was tasked to provide data management and mission software services and ensure the continuous and secure delivery of NHSN services.
“The migration to the cloud is step one in our broader modernization journey,” shared Brian Fitzgerald, program director for the CDC NHSN program at Leidos. “This positions us to take advantage of new cloud-based tools and enables the capabilities we need to better serve our user community.”
According to the company, the migration was completed after a 15-month preparation and collaboration with Microsoft Azure and multiple groups within CDC.
In 2005, the CDC introduced the NHSN to identify and prevent the spread of health care-associated infections, or HAI. Over the years, it has evolved to facilitate vaccination coverage and health care system capacity monitoring and public health emergency response.
The system has over 167,000 users across 38,800 healthcare facilities daily.
Next Steps in NHSN’s Modernization
In addition to transitioning to the cloud, the modernization of the infection surveillance system will include the introduction of automation and other features that would improve user experience.
Fitzgerald said that the Leidos team will adopt human-centered design principles to make it easier for NHSN end users to perform their daily tasks.
