HEALTHCARE · PUBLIC HEALTH AGENCIES
Independent governance, oversight, and managed technology services for the state, county, and municipal agencies responsible for population health and public health infrastructure.
THE PUBLIC HEALTH REALITY
Public health agencies carry responsibility for populations, not just patients. Disease surveillance, case investigation, vital records, immunization registries, environmental health, HIE connectivity, and emergency preparedness all run on technology stacks that are aging out of support, under-funded, and under-modernized relative to the stakes. Post-COVID federal and state funding is real, but narrow windows and the procurement capacity of health departments usually do not match.
Sentinel Solutions Group makes sure those decisions land in your favor, whether you are modernizing a state health department or a single-county vital records office. We do not sell the technology. We govern the decisions around it.
3,000+
state, tribal, and local health departments in the United States
$4B+
in public health data modernization funding since 2020 (CDC)
100%
of public health agencies touch HIPAA data and must govern it
CHALLENGE
Public health agencies are managing simultaneous technology pressures (CDC Data Modernization Initiative alignment, HIE integration, case investigation platforms, vital records modernization, emergency preparedness systems) while vendors compete for grant-funded dollars with platforms that may not fit the agency’s actual workflows. The field staff doing case investigation and the executives making decisions rarely have an independent technical voice in the room. Sentinel fills that gap: practitioner-led advisory, vendor-neutral evaluation, and program governance built by people who understand public health operations, not just public health technology.
THE CHALLENGES
CMOs, CMIOs, and IT directors are navigating a landscape that punishes the wrong technology decision and rewards the right one. These are the pressures we help hospitals manage.
CDC DMI funding has to be deployed against platforms that actually interoperate with state HIEs, clinical systems, and federal reporting. Rushed buys become ten-year burdens.
Outbreak response depends on case management, contact tracing, lab integration, and reporting pipelines that work under load. COVID exposed the gaps. Most still are not fixed.
Birth, death, marriage, and immunization systems are the oldest technology in most health departments. Modernization has to preserve decades of data, not just the next decade.
SaaS pricing escalation, proprietary data formats, hidden integration fees, and vague SLAs are baked into most public-safety vendor contracts. Without independent scrutiny, hospitals sign deals that punish them at every renewal.
Patient safety and clinical outcomes depend on data flowing across EHR, HIE, lab, pharmacy, imaging, and revenue cycle systems, and with regional hospitals, state HIEs, public health agencies, and payers. Most hospitals still struggle with basic interoperability.
New technology only works if nurses, physicians, and clinical staff actually use it. Recruiting, training, and change management are as critical as the platform itself, and they are routinely under-budgeted in modernization programs.
OUR APPROACH
Sentinel was built by people who came up inside healthcare and the technology that supports it. Our team brings decades of bedside, administrative, and engineering experience across the largest health systems in the region, then trained clinicians on technology, workflow, and process. Our advisory board includes practicing clinicians and leaders (nurses, physicians, and clinical directors) who have served everywhere from agriculture country to the largest metro departments. That lived experience shapes every recommendation we make.
We understand the operational reality of healthcare because we have lived it. Our team knows what clinicians need at 2 a.m., and we know how to translate that into the procurement, governance, and contract language that protects the hospital long after.
We have built, sold, and deployed the EHR, HIE, clinical applications, and clinical documentation platforms healthcare organizations are evaluating. We know the contract language, the hidden SKUs, the integration gotchas, and the renewal traps that vendors do not advertise.
Our co-founder served as a Principal Systems Engineer overseeing some of the most complex healthcare IT environments in the country, and our advisory board adds decades of additional engineering depth across HIPAA, networks, infrastructure, and cybersecurity.
You do not get a single consultant, you get the full bench. Our advisory board of practicing clinicians, nursing leaders, and healthcare IT veterans is actively involved in every engagement, tailored to your specific program. Sentinel is one of the only firms that brings both deep technical expertise and operational breadth directly tied to mission-critical clinical operations.
Most consultancies frame the work as picking the right vendor. Sentinel frames it as governing the public health technology program, not the platform. The vendors come and go. The contracts get rewritten. The audit cycle never stops. Someone needs to be accountable to the agency, not to the next sales target.
That is the work Sentinel does. We sit on the agency side of the table, every meeting, every decision, every cycle. No resale margin. No referral fees. No commissions on the contracts we recommend. The only loyalty is to the operation.
We govern the program. We never sell the platforms.
A public health agency runs on data infrastructure that was funded reactively after the last emergency. The technology decisions made today determine whether the agency can detect the next outbreak, share data with federal partners, and defend its budget when the emergency funding lapses. These are the forces shaping those decisions.
Federal supplemental funding for public health data modernization through CDC and HHS is moving from emergency appropriations into base budget contestation. ASTHO and NACCHO have documented the funding cliff, and agencies that built modernized surveillance during the pandemic are entering the sustainability phase.
Sentinel implication: An agency whose surveillance system depends on lapsing federal funding is approaching a budget cliff while the federal reporting expectations remain. The sustainability model has to be defined now, not after the funding ends.
Source: ASTHO (Association of State and Territorial Health Officials) policy briefs; NACCHO (National Association of County and City Health Officials) workforce and infrastructure reports; CDC Public Health Data Strategy
AI-augmented syndromic surveillance, outbreak signal detection, and predictive analytics have entered public health agency procurement. CDC and academic research consortia have begun policy work on AI in public health, but no operational standard exists, and vendor claims about accuracy require independent validation.
Sentinel implication: An agency that adopts AI surveillance without a validation framework is building decision support that may not hold up at the next outbreak review. The validation methodology precedes the procurement.
Source: CDC Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics; NIST AI Risk Management Framework; academic public health AI evaluation literature
The CDC Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) has established the federal-aligned framework for public health data infrastructure, with implementation guidance, data quality expectations, and federal grant alignment. Agencies misaligned with DMI are increasingly disadvantaged in federal funding.
Sentinel implication: An agency whose data architecture is not aligned with DMI is operating outside the federal-aligned framework. Federal funding eligibility increasingly depends on the alignment posture.
Source: CDC Data Modernization Initiative (DMI); CDC Public Health Data Strategy; CSTE (Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists) implementation guidance
Social Determinants of Health integration, Medicaid data sharing, vital records modernization, and cross-jurisdictional surveillance have made the operational unit of public health data the multi-agency framework, not the single-agency database. Federal grants increasingly require documented data-sharing agreements.
Sentinel implication: An agency whose data architecture cannot share with Medicaid, vital records, and partner agencies is operating below the federal-grant standard. The data-sharing posture precedes the surveillance architecture.
Source: CDC Public Health Data Strategy; HHS data sharing initiatives; Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) framework
Sustained public health workforce shortages, documented across ASTHO and NACCHO surveys, combined with the political environment around public health, have made the workforce model unstable. The technology decisions are increasingly substitutes for or amplifiers of scarce staff capacity.
Sentinel implication: An agency whose technology assumes a stable, fully staffed epidemiology and surveillance workforce is making assumptions that do not match the operating reality. The workforce model and the technology architecture have to converge.
Source: ASTHO Public Health Workforce reports; NACCHO local health department workforce surveys; de Beaumont Foundation Public Health Workforce Interests and Needs Survey
CORE CAPABILITIES
Every engagement is anchored in six disciplines that protect hospitals from bad decisions, bad contracts, and bad outcomes.
Clinicians will use a system if it is built for them and rolled out the right way, and abandon it if it is not. We design change strategies informed by real-world deployments, including our founder’s Joint Commission to ICD-10 national coding transition experience, so adoption sticks.
We identify the technical, operational, contractual, cyber, HIPAA, and political risks that threaten your program, and build mitigation strategies your CEO, CMO, or board can defend in any audit, after-action, or community meeting.
RFP development, scoring rubric design, vendor evaluation, reference checks, contract negotiation, and SOW authoring. We level the playing field so the best fit wins, not the best sales team or the slickest demo.
PMP-disciplined program governance with public-sector fluency. We structure work for political visibility, audit defensibility, and multi-administration continuity, so your modernization survives elections, budget cycles, and command turnover.
Beyond advisory. Sentinel can operate alongside your team, maintaining EHR and clinical systems environments, mobile data infrastructure, clinical archives, networks, cybersecurity controls, and every system that touches patient safety and clinical integrity.
We watch the vendor so you do not have to. Independent verification and validation across milestones, data conversion, acceptance testing, training, go-live, and warranty, keeping vendors accountable to the contract you signed.
Most firms specialize in one slice, the EHR, the revenue cycle, the imaging, the analytics. We have sat at every seat and engineered every layer. This signature is how we see the full arc, and where Sentinel sits most actively.
Five ongoing services shaped by the pressures of modern healthcare. Records systems kept clean against CMS and Joint Commission reporting standards, critical incidents reviewed with defensibility in mind, and clinical analytics built to actually reduce time-to-resolution.
Ongoing EHR configuration, user management, reporting setup, and system optimization.
Continuous validation of reporting data to ensure CMS and Joint Commission reporting accuracy, with audit-ready documentation.
Independent analysis of high-risk incidents to identify trends and reduce liability exposure.
Streamlining body camera and clinical documentation processes to reduce backlog and improve audit and compliance readiness.
Full lifecycle support for RTCC development, including staffing models, workflows, and technology integration.
OUR PRACTICES
Every Sentinel engagement is governed by proprietary practices built for the realities of healthcare technology, not borrowed from commercial IT playbooks.
PROGRAM MANAGEMENT
How we govern your program.
PMP-disciplined program governance structured for multi-jurisdictional complexity, elected leadership accountability, and federal grant compliance. Every milestone and decision gate is designed for the healthcare reality, where executive transitions, board oversight, CMS mandates, and union negotiations shape the timeline more than any vendor’s project plan.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT
How we prepare your people.
Organizational change management built for bedside clinicians, charge nurses, and clinical leadership, not corporate end users. We design adoption strategies informed by shift rotations, union dynamics, field deployment realities, and the operational truth that your EHR and clinical systems cannot go dark for training. When the new system goes live, your clinicians and staff are ready.
CONFIGURATION AUTHORITY
How we own the configuration.
Configuration authority for disease surveillance systems, case investigation platforms, vital records modernization, and HIE integration. Sentinel owns the foundational decisions around case definitions, reporting workflows, lab interoperability, and data-sharing structure, producing the Blueprint, training, and administrator documentation that survives grant cycles and outbreak surge response.
VALUE ASSURANCE
How we prove the value.
Post-deployment governance for your public health information system investment. Sentinel independently measures whether surveillance, case management, and interoperability outcomes specified at procurement are being realized, and documents where system performance diverges from public health obligations.
After engagement closes, Sentinel Sustain keeps the practice active across the life of the investment. Three tiers: Core, Active, and Strategic.
Learn more →Four practices, applied to one operating environment: the surveillance pipeline, the case investigation workflow, the registry, and the federal reporting submission. Each practice carries a specific scope and a specific deliverable cadence.
On a surveillance system migration, contact-tracing platform deployment, or DMI-aligned data modernization program, SDF runs the phase plan, the gate reviews, and the vendor accountability cadence. The health officer sees a defensible program record at every board-of-health briefing, and a documented audit trail at every CDC funding review. SDF holds the program steady through funding cliffs, political transitions, and the inevitable mid-deployment surprise.
When an agency deploys a new surveillance system, integrates with Medicaid or vital records, or aligns to CDC Data Modernization, SRM prepares the workforce for what changes and what stays the same. Epidemiologist workflow analysis, investigator enablement, partner-agency coordination, and the post-go-live support cadence are scoped against operational reality during normal operations and outbreaks.
During surveillance system deployment, registry configuration, or cross-agency data-sharing rollout, SDB is the practitioner-delivered configuration authority that sits on the agency's side of the table. Case definition rules, data-sharing agreements, federal reporting field mapping, DMI-aligned interoperability, and the technical decisions vendors typically push back on are documented with the agency's answer in the room. SDB is delivered by Sentinel practitioners. It is not offered as training.
Twelve, twenty-four, and thirty-six months after deployment, including during and after outbreak responses, SVA reviews whether the system is performing to the documented intent: surveillance signal quality, federal reporting integrity, data-sharing completeness, and configuration drift the agency did not see at procurement time. The findings are advisory and non-binding by design. Sentinel documents. We do not litigate. No legal representation. No expert witness role. SVA is delivered by Sentinel practitioners. It is not offered as training.
DEEP EXPERTISE
These are the specific platforms, standards, protocols, and operational disciplines we work in every day.
WE KNOW THE TRICKS OF THE TRADE
These are the traps that consume budgets, derail timelines, and leave hospitals stuck with systems that do not serve them. We have seen them firsthand, and we know exactly how to neutralize them.
01
EHR and clinical platform vendors that encode patient data, workflow metadata, and report templates in formats only they can read. We insist on open data standards, documented schemas, and exportability clauses before the contract is signed.
02
The line items that appear after go-live: lab interfaces, imaging integrations, pharmacy connectors, HIE feeds, and “professional services” fees for every custom API call. We surface them during procurement, not after.
03
Per-user licensing that escalates with system growth, storage tiers that punish retention compliance, and per-export fees for clinical documents or data migration. We negotiate caps, predictable storage costs, and portability terms up front.
04
Cloud and managed-service vendors that sign HIPAA attestations they cannot actually fulfill, leaving your organization holding the bag at audit time. We verify HIPAA posture before the contract, not after the breach.
05
Vendors who promise “intuitive” platforms and deliver weeks of clinician training your team was never warned about. We demand realistic training hours, super-user programs, and protected ramp-up periods in the SOW.
06
Organizations that sign based on demos and reference calls curated by the vendor. We conduct independent reference checks and dig into how the platform actually performs at organizations of comparable size and complexity.
WHO YOU ARE WORKING WITH
The people who lead every Sentinel engagement have spent their careers inside hospitals, behind the engineering consoles of the country’s most complex clinical systems, and at the bedside and nursing stations that keep patients safe.
HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS & NURSING LEADERSHIP
HEALTHCARE, CLINICAL OPERATIONS & PATIENT SAFETY ADVISORY
Also Supporting Your Program
The right engagement depends on where the agency is in the program lifecycle. Each tier has its own scope discipline and its own deliverable cadence.
End-to-end managed operations for the surveillance, case investigation, registry, and reporting infrastructure Sentinel helped you deploy. Sustainment, vendor coordination, CDC-aligned version-upgrade discipline, and 24/7 response support during outbreaks. The case data is still flowing into the dashboard, because someone is still accountable for the pipeline between events.
We govern the program. We never sell the platforms.
Read moreOngoing retainer with quarterly governance reviews, pre-decision advisory, and an open line for health-officer response, board-of-health briefings, federal reporting, and vendor escalations. The agency has independent counsel on the technology side of the table, before the next funding cycle, the next outbreak, or the next data-sharing agreement.
Sentinel documents. We do not litigate.
Read moreAnchored to one of SDF, SRM, SDB, or SVA. Best when the agency knows which discipline is needed: a surveillance system migration, contact-tracing rollout change readiness, configuration authority on data-sharing across federal and local partners, or post-deployment outcome governance. Fixed scope, named practice, defined deliverables.
Independent. Practitioner-led. Vendor-neutral.
Explore subscriptionsA specialized service plus a signature practice plus Sentinel Institute training, packaged as a single integrated engagement. For agencies standing up a new public health technology stack from scratch and building the institutional capacity to operate it through the next emergency and the next funding cliff.
Cutting-edge. Never bleeding-edge.
Read moreTemplates, Tools, and Office Hours
Low-touch entry tier. Sentinel templates, tools, reference materials, and scheduled office hours. The agency runs its own program; Sentinel provides the assets and answers the questions when they come up. No retainer, no embedded staff, no committed scope.
Best when: The agency wants Sentinel's templates and judgment but is not ready to engage a subscription. A starting point that can scale up if the program grows.
Built for the agency. Sized for the start.
Read more about Standard Access →Most agencies run multiple technology programs at once. Sentinel work in public health work typically pairs with one or more of these companion disciplines, where the same governance discipline applies.
Crisis response data and public health surveillance intersect at the population-health layer.
Public health and emergency management share data flow during outbreaks and disasters.
Surveillance system security is part of the federal-aligned cyber posture.
A thirty-minute conversation about your program, your timing, and what is actually going to get used. Then we will recommend an engagement, a subscription, or no action at all. Whatever the agency actually needs.
Schedule a conversation