Improving efficiency of COVID-19 aggregate case and death surveillance data transmission for jurisdictions: current and future role of application programming interfaces (APIs)

During the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supplemented traditional COVID-19 case and death reporting with COVID-19 aggregate case and death surveillance (ACS) to track daily cumulative numbers. Later, as public health jurisdictions (PHJs) revised the historical COVID-19 case and death data due to data reconciliation and updates, CDC devised a manual process to update these records in the ACS dataset for improving the accuracy of COVID-19 case and death data. Automatic data transfer via an application programming interface (API), an intermediary that enables software applications to communicate, reduces the time and effort in transferring data from PHJs to CDC. However, APIs must meet specific content requirements for use by CDC. As of March 2022, CDC has integrated APIs from 3 jurisdictions for COVID-19 ACS. Expanded use of APIs may provide efficiencies for COVID-19 and other emergency response planning efforts as evidenced by this proof-of-concept. In this article, we share the utility of APIs in COVID-19 ACS.