Public health authority legislative update.

For this month’s legislative update, we highlight bills seeking to strengthen emergency preparedness and other essential public health services by improving public health data collection and sharing.

Data are central to public health; it is how we tap into the scale and variety of lived experiences and local conditions in our communities and tailor responses to complex or evolving public health risks. This is especially important as we implement lessons learned during COVID-19. We’ve seen promising efforts to modernize public health data infrastructure, embed equity in data practices, facilitate data sharing, and ensure public access to data while also protecting individual privacy interests.