CDC Promotes Innovation

CDC must meet continually increasing demands for more extensive, higher quality services to meet a host of public health challenges and threats that are further fueled by globalization, demographic change, and evolving technology. Innovation is essential for improving the value and range of services that CDC delivers to its customers and stakeholders, especially competition for financial resources and public health funding intensifies.

Consequently, CDC seeks innovative solutions to protect the health of all people and to solve pressing public health problems. One strategy is determining how CDC can more effectively engage civil and private sectors. In this context, innovation will require us to use collective thinking—involving both our traditional go-to partners and new nontraditional partners—to face these challenges.

Taking a fresh look at how we can use everyday technologies—such as cell phones, iPods, and the Internet—to promote health has great potential for making us healthier and safer. So do a myriad of evolving ideas such as portable or electronic health records; technological solutions to preventing workplace injuries; new methods for delivering vaccines and medications; biosurveillance monitoring and reporting; and the rich field of research based on genetics. And we need to take a fresh look at our homes and communities to find new ways to improve the health and well-being of communities across the United States and around the globe.

CDC is involved in one way or another with innovative work in all of those areas and many others, and it has a history of finding innovation solutions to respond to public health problems and issues.

Recently, the CDC Director’s Innovation Awards were established to recognize the many extraordinary members of the CDC community who use innovation to advance CDC’s mission to create the knowledge, tools, and networks that people and communities need to protect their health—through health promotion; prevention of disease, injury, and disability; and preparedness for threats. These awards are one way CDC seeks to stimulate even more innovation.