Public and Private Sector Partnerships to Improve Efficiency in Electronic Laboratory Reporting to Public Health Agencies

The Association of Public Health Laboratories, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Quest Diagnostic Laboratories collaborated to implement a scalable, extensible model for public health reporting that increased electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) for Quest from 3 million reports in 2015 to 17.5 million reports in 2023. This volume represented a 15% increase in US ELR coverage, from 75% to 90% nationwide from 2015 to 2023. As of early 2026, Quest had sent >200 million ELR messages through the Association of Public Health Laboratories Informatics Messaging Services (AIMS) platform. AIMS is a public health data exchange intermediary that performs shared services, translation, and transformation and maintains connections with state public health agencies (PHAs) and public health laboratories. Using the AIMS platform to validate and route ELR messages reduced the point-to-point connections that Quest must maintain and the onboarding time to connect to each PHA. By using a single messaging standard to exchange data with >50 PHAs, Quest can maintain these feeds with minimal overhead. In 2020, Quest leveraged this existing connection with AIMS to quickly add COVID-19 to the data feed; as a result, Quest became one of the first private laboratories to send COVID-19 data to state PHAs, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the US Department of Health and Human Services. We describe this crucial milestone in ELR and the lessons learned through the early stages of the project. This successful public–private partnership has been replicated for other use cases and establishes AIMS as the centralized health information exchange network for public health.