The Backbone You Don’t See: How AIMS Powers Public Health Every Day

Timely laboratory results can be the difference between life and death. Behind nearly every disease report, newborn screening result and outbreak investigation runs a piece of infrastructure most people never see. It’s called the APHL Informatics Messaging Services (AIMS) Platform.

So, what is it, and why should it matter to the person at the bench or the person running a laboratory?

One Connection, Any Direction, Any Data

AIMS is a secure, cloud-based platform that acts as a hub for exchanging vital public health data. APHL launched it with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2008, and the first Public Health Laboratory Interoperability Project (PHLIP) influenza surveillance message went to CDC that year. The first senders were public health laboratories. Influenza was the first disease tracked on the system.

It has grown a great deal since then. AIMS is now the foundational infrastructure for the nation’s public health system, moving more than 50 million records a month across roughly 74 public health agencies and laboratories and more than 60,000 connected healthcare organizations.

Here’s a way to picture it: AIMS is a high-speed interstate for critical health information, carrying healthcare records, birth and death records, laboratory test orders and results, and more from one point to another. APHL’s Michelle Meigs, managing director, Informatics, has offered another version: What FedEx is to package delivery, AIMS is to health data—a way to get information where it needs to go fast, secure and intact.

Why It Matters

Before AIMS, sharing health data often meant mail or a fax machine. That was slow, less secure and easy to get wrong. A rushed sender might shorten a patient’s name to save a few seconds, or a number got transposed somewhere along the way, and then someone had to catch the incomplete or incorrect report and fix it. That’s more time lost. With all 50 states feeding data to CDC, the old way didn’t scale.

Speed is only part of the value. The bigger part is reusability. Every service runs on the same infrastructure, so public health can stand up new use cases without building new connections. When COVID-19 hit in early 2020 and CDC needed to move testing data from the states, APHL didn’t have to spend millions on a new transport system. AIMS was already there. That “do once, apply at scale” design is why one connection can replace hundreds of point-to-point interfaces, and why adding capacity means adding services rather than infrastructure.

AIMS also translates. It transforms data into the format each partner needs, so systems that otherwise couldn’t talk to each other can. A JPEG attached to an email is useless to a provider’s system. A message delivered straight into the health record is not. That interoperability is what gives providers, epidemiologists and the public a full picture to act on.

Supporting the Youngest Patients

Newborn screening is one of the clearest examples. Within hours of birth, nearly every baby in the United States is screened for serious but treatable conditions, and doctors need those results fast to start treatment that can save a life. Detor, the electronic test order and result service on AIMS, connects the public health laboratory directly with the birth hospital, sometimes before the baby even has a name. AIMS can also report the birth to the state’s vital records registry through STEVE, or the State and Territorial Exchange of Vital Events, which opens the door to things like insurance enrollment and a Social Security number.

Built for What Comes Next

AIMS is FISMA- and HIPAA-certified, hardened by more than 18 years in production, and named one of the nation’s public health intermediaries. New priorities keep arriving, from TEFCA-based exchange to AI-assisted workflows, and the platform is built to carry them on the same trusted foundation instead of starting from zero each time.

A newborn screening result in Alaska. A foodborne illness report in Texas. A cancer pathology record headed to a registry. AIMS gets that data where it needs to go, so people get treated and lives get saved.