A mountain state adopts a statewide disease surveillance platform, and go-live is uneventful.
Product leadership brought into public health. A patchwork of disease-specific systems and paper reporting became one market-ready platform, configured community by community — and it went live on the calendar date everyone had been given.
Zero
days of slippage against the announced go-live date
Every
disease surveillance community configured to its own practice
Two
states now building on the same implementation baseline
What was breaking
The state’s epidemiology program was robust and widely admired. Its data collection was not.
County by county and across the state, disparate disease-specific surveillance systems sat alongside paper-based reporting. Each disease community had its own instrument, its own case definitions, and its own working idea of what “reported” meant — which made a statewide picture something you assembled by hand, late, and then argued about.
In line with the Centers for Disease Control’s national direction for data modernization, the state chose to adopt a market-ready, best-in-class platform stretching across every jurisdiction. That decision turned a technology purchase into a question about people and process, which is the part these programs usually lose.
A statewide platform only works if every disease community can still recognize its own practice inside it. So the sequence was communities, not modules.
What we did
Balanced people, process and technology across a multi-year engagement, and brought the discipline of product leadership into the realm of public health.
Sequenced by community, not by module
The platform had to be customizable and configurable to the needs and wants of each specific disease surveillance team, so each community got its own phase — its own configuration, its own definitions, its own readiness date inside the program plan.
Prototypes before production, every phase
Rapid prototyping sprints with user acceptance testing ahead of each production release kept the implementation relevant to the people who would live in it, and resilient to the communities still to come.
Product leadership inside a public health program
Roadmap, tradeoffs and release discipline run as product work rather than procurement — alongside change management, coaching for the leaders carrying it, and mentorship for the teams doing it.
What we brought
- Product leadership
- Change management expertise
- Leadership coaching
- Team mentorship
What stayed with people
Three things were never handed to the platform.
- 01Case definitions. Each disease community kept authorship of its own, and the configuration followed them — not the reverse.
- 02Readiness. A community went to production when its own testing said so; no team had its practice rewritten by a date set elsewhere.
- 03Judgment about what the data means. The platform moved reporting; epidemiologists kept interpretation.
Practicing active listening, convening stakeholders on a regular cadence and working to drive transparency meant stakeholders felt respected and included — and readily offered the expertise and input that made the base implementation stronger than the vendor configuration would have been on its own.
Before and after
Stated qualitatively: this program’s pre-engagement baseline was never instrumented, and we would rather say so than publish a number we cannot source.
What came of it
- 01Go-live exceeded the expectations of both the business unit and the broader disease surveillance community — a seamless, uneventful day, on the calendar date that had been set.
- 02The state-specific implementation is now the baseline for an adjoining state’s implementation.
- 03Customizations the state arrived at have been folded into the platform itself and approved by its governance body for any future implementation, in any jurisdiction.
- 04The transition held data integrity and the reporting needs of an ongoing pandemic response throughout, fully compliant with state and federal guidelines.