Dallas County Public Health Disease Surveillance and Investigation System

Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) has been recognized as a 2023 HIMSS Public Health Davies Award recipient.

DCHHS is a public health department responsible for providing public health and social services that protect the health and well-being of over 2.6 million people in Dallas County, Texas. To combat the COVID-19 pandemic, DCHHS employed a variety of enterprise level software solutions to manage and automate a huge increase in data volume without sacrificing data quality, conduct large-scale contact tracing to understand and control spread, and improve disease investigation workflows and data visualizations to reduce the burden placed on public health professionals.  It serves as an exemplary and important foundation for data modernization efforts to address other important public health conditions.

HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence

The HIMSS the Davies Award for Public Health showcases recipients who leverage the power of information and technology to enhance public health, promote health equity, and provide actionable insights to improve the wellness of the community they serve. Specifically, Davies Award for Public Health case studies reflect the work of public health organizations leveraging information and technology to enhance core public health services (contact tracing, syndromic disease surveillance reporting, electronic case reporting, notifiable disease surveillance, vital records reporting, electronic reportable laboratory results reporting, and immunization registry reporting and queries) and drive faster, more actionable intelligence to improve community health.  The Davies Awards program promotes HIMSS’s vision and mission by recognizing and sharing use cases, model practices and lessons learned on how to improve health and wellness through the power of information and technology.

“We are honored to be recognized as a HIMSS Davies Public Health Award Recipient. While COVID-19 was an unprecedented public health challenge for all of us, it also served as an opportunity for us to apply and implement cutting edge technology to address this and future public health issues. We are thankful for the collaborative work from everyone at DCHHS, Accenture, Parkland Hospital System, the Parkland Center for Clinical Innovation, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and our other partners to help us build a state of the art infrastructure for public health data that should prepare us for the future,” said Dr. Philip Huang, Director of DCHHS. “This collaborative effort is an example of the importance and capability of information and technology to improve the health and wellness of the people of Dallas County.”