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Public Health Laboratory Impact Tool

Demonstrate the impact of your laboratory on disease prevention and control within the greater public health system. The Public Health Laboratory Impact Tool for Salmonella can provide concrete, localized data on the impact of your Salmonella surveillance activities.

Complete the Tool in 30 minutes
Questions?

Contact the Food Safety team: [email protected]

About the Public Health Laboratory Impact To​​​ol​

For years, public health laboratories have sought to better articulate their value to partners and funders—such as state legislatures—beyond relaying test counts or response times. With continual loss of funding and increased demand for limited resources, public health laboratories need new tools to demonstrate their impact on disease prevention and control within the greater public health system.

The Public Health Laboratory Impact Tool for Salmonella is the first resource of its kind, created by APHL and our members and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because the Tool can be modified to include unique, contextually specific elements, it allows public health laboratories to easily measure the change in Salmonella cases and associated costs due to surveillance activities on a local, state, regional or national scale.

APHL and a workgroup of member representatives partnered with a team of health economists from CDC’s Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases. The APHL and CDC team focused initial efforts on measuring the impact of public health laboratory surveillance activities for a particular pathogen, Salmonella, which is frequently associated with foodborne illnesses and outbreaks.

APHL hopes to expand this innovative concept and continue the development of similar resources in other programmatic areas.

Data in Action

Using the Impact Tool for Salmone​lla

Data Entry

Laboratories can complete the Public Health Laboratory Impact Tool in as little as thirty minutes via CDC's website​, supported by an instructional manual.

Public Health Laboratories can enter jurisdiction-specific data or use the Tool's default values to produce a summary of health and economic impacts of laboratory-based surveillance and testing for Salmonella, as well as estimates of Salmonella cases, hospitalizations and medical costs averted.

Access the CDC tool, manual and report template

Communicating Your Results

The Tool’s outputs can be used for educating legislative staff, improving internal operations, or building relationships with clinical partners via the CDC example report template, manually copying select tables or exporting a full report. Along with spreadsheet-based tool outputs, the report can be quickly adapted to highlight select elements, allowing it to be tailored to a jurisdiction’s needs.

In addition to the CDC example report template, you can use our editable template to create an educational one-pager for state legislators, program partners, and internal program and operations staff. Download the template and customize it using the Tool's outputs and examples of individual outbreak stories and successes.