A Need for Secure Vital Records Data Sharing

The budget of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has slowly and steadily increased, and in each year, we’ve seen Congress prioritize funding for the vital statistics infrastructure.” This funding plays a critical role in allowing birth and death data to be shared across state lines. In this day and age, people rarely die where they were born, and tracking that vital record information is ever more difficult, and also ever more important. “The STEVE (State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events) system is the cornerstone of such data sharing”, but the STEVE system is outdated and now poses a security risk if we continue to use if for data sharing. As such, NAPHSIS has been urging lawmakers to provide funding to improve STEVE and bring it up to date with today’s technology, to prevent risk of security breach with vital data, and to accelerate sharing of the vital records data across state lines, and throughout the country.