Saving Days, Saving Lives: How Detor Is Modernizing Nationwide Newborn Screening Data Exchange

Each year, 99.9% of the 3.6 million babies born in the Unites States receive a newborn screening test conducted by a public health laboratory. Approximately 12,500 of those babies receive a positive result that can lead to a potentially serious or fatal condition if not detected and treated early. For many of the conditions screened, the time between birth and the onset of irreversible damage is only a few days. And thus, the speed of information matters: When test results are available faster, a simple intervention can shift a baby’s trajectory from chronic disability or early death to one of normal growth and development.

Immediate intervention requires access to immediate information, and despite living in an increasingly digital world, many public health laboratories still rely on cumbersome manual data entry and slower paper-based solutions for sending and receiving test orders and results due to constraints in funding, resources and time. To solve this longstanding challenge and to ensure that critical information is shared in time to provide critical care, APHL—in partnership with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—developed Detor.  

What Is Detor?

Detor bridges the gap between public health and clinical care, ensuring that life-saving data moves at the speed of modern medicine. Detor is a national public health intermediary that sits between a public health laboratory’s laboratory information management system (LIMS) and a healthcare organization’s (HCO’s) electronic health records (EHRs). Instead of connecting to one another directly, each organization builds a single interface to Detor, which eliminates the need for multiple custom interfaces and replaces slower, error-prone manual processes. Detor allows public health laboratories and healthcare facilities to plug into existing infrastructure and take advantage of shared resources, expertise and technology across the public health landscape. In other words, APHL builds and shares messaging routes centrally for its members as opposed to every public health laboratory and HCO having to build and maintain them independently and repeatedly.

Nationwide Impact

Since going live in August 2024, Detor has demonstrated great success nationwide. The eight public health laboratories and 73 HCOs that are currently live on Detor have exchanged more than 200,000 orders and results—with 94% of those being for newborn screening—and have seen significant improvements in data exchange efficiency, result turnaround time and data quality.

Result Availability Improvement: 42%, or an average of 4.5 days faster.

With Detor, results are triggered to be sent electronically to the patient’s chart as soon as available, meaning the process no longer relies on manual intervention (e.g., uploading PDFs, intercepting/copying a fax). By eliminating those human steps of the workflow, Detor has allowed for results to be received by the provider and the patient’s family an average of 4.5 days faster.

In some cases, the impact is even more pronounced. Detor replaced a lengthy and highly manual newborn screening process between Alaska’s Fairbanks Memorial Hospital and the State Hygienic Laboratory at the University of Iowa. Detor now automates the flow of data and delivers critical results six days faster, ensuring that vulnerable newborns in even the most remote areas of Alaska can receive life-saving interventions as quickly as possible.

Data Entry Time Saved at Public Health Laboratory: 80%, or an average of 11+ minutes saved per test.

Data Entry Time Saved at HCO: 90%, or an average of 10+ minutes saved per test.

Without Detor, healthcare staff request tests by manually entering information from the patient’s chart into a different portal or by handwriting that same duplicative information on the bloodspot card. In turn, the public health laboratory needs to manually transfer the received information into their own LIMS and follow up on orders with typos, missing fields or ineligible writing. With Detor, both healthcare and public health laboratory staff are saved time by eliminating the need for duplicative data entry—the order is pre-populated with information from the patient’s EHR and then made directly available in the public health laboratory’s LIMS. This has led to significant time savings for public health laboratories and HCOs, allowing them to focus their time on what truly matters: conducting testing and providing care.

And the higher the volume, the greater the impact; for instance, in Florida, where 10% of the state’s 2025 babies had their newborn screening orders and results exchanged via Detor, Orlando Health saved more than 1,180 hours (or the full time equivalent of nine weeks per year) by eliminating their manual resulting process.

Detor has enabled HCOs and public health laboratories to exchange test orders and results faster and more efficiently than ever before. As a national solution, Detor is able to centralize, share technical solutions and reduce the burden on public health laboratories and their partners who would otherwise have to implement multiple redundant interfaces. Most importantly, Detor gives time back to those that conduct the tests, those that need the results to provide care and patients who can use that time to heal.

To learn more about Detor visit the Detor Resource Center. If your laboratory is interested in implementing, e-mail [email protected] to schedule a discovery call.