How Fairfax County Health Department Achieved 4x Growth in Real-Time Integrations to Modernize Public Health Data

Fairfax County Health Department (FCHD) is the largest local health district in Virginia. Its responsibilities span a public health laboratory, epidemiology, school health, emergency preparedness, and environmental health. Fairfax operates with a unique blend of autonomy, being locally governed while still part of the Virginia Department of Health structure.  

This scale created both opportunity and challenge: how could this lean informatics team better keep pace with growing public health demands? 

When a key server failed, leadership faced a pivotal decision: rebuild the old infrastructure or leap forward with a modern solution that would connect data faster with automation and APIs.  For years, data exchange had remained minimal and largely manual. A few SFTP connections with the state’s department of health were maintained, and aging infrastructure left little room for innovation.  

Moving to a more modern solution would enable the team to: 

• Replace end-of-life infrastructure before it jeopardized operations. 

• Better support API adoption for regulatory related initiatives like the CDC FHIR pilot. 

• Focus on data use and strategy by freeing staff from server maintenance and error firefighting. 

• Overcome bandwidth constraints without adding new headcount, a difficult task in the resource-constrained world of local public health. 

Director of Public Health Informatics and IT, Noel Clarin, captured the dilemma: “Do we want to spend time managing messages, or putting the data to use?” 

Fairfax chose Rhapsody Envoy iPaaS, automates and monitors healthcare data connections so teams can innovate faster and scale smarter.  

Several factors drove this choice: 

• Familiarity: The Virginia Department of Health, a close partner of Fairfax County, uses Rhapsody Integration, which is the foundation of Rhapsody Envoy. This created a shared technical language that streamlines connectivity conversations and speeds time to connections. 

• Efficiency: The Fairfax staff would be free from needing specialized health data integration expertise.  

• Support: With Envoy, the Rhapsody team creates, monitors, upgrades, and troubleshoots connections — tasks that had previously stalled projects. 

• Strategy: By shifting this critical function to Envoy, Fairfax shifted integration from being a cost center to being a strategic enabler – the team had time to focus on data strategy and public health innovation rather than interface creation and system maintenance. 

Implementation was smooth and collaborative. Rhapsody engineers joined Fairfax vendor calls, helping the county navigate complex EHR and LIS integrations. Instead of retrofitting old connections, the team built new, modernized interfaces from the ground up, aligning with broader modernization goals. What could have taken months was condensed into weeks. 

The impact of the transition was immediate and transformative. The move to an automated, cloud-based platform turned data exchange from a fragile burden into a foundation for faster disease response, population insights, and compliance with national interoperability mandates. 

• 4x more connections, real time: Expanded automated feeds, fueling a county-wide data lake. 

• Reporting in hours, not months: Mortality and natality reports now update nightly instead of monthly.  

• Rapid issue resolution: Issues resolved within 24 hours, cutting reliance on borrowed specialists.  

• Freed scarce IT resources: No more patching, upgrades, or transport layer security (TLS) firefighting; the team focuses on data strategy, not server care. 

• Built trust with partners: Reliable reporting led state officials to drop redundant fax requirements. 

What had once been a reactive, resource-stretched environment quickly evolved into a resilient system. Automated reporting delivered timelier insights; IT staff gained the freedom to focus on strategy, and trust with state partners deepened. For Fairfax, the shift was not just about technology; it was about reclaiming the capacity to use data proactively to improve health outcomes for its community. 

Building on its success with Envoy, Fairfax is pursuing new initiatives that will reshape how public health data supports the community. A disease surveillance platform will enable real-time immunization query and response, while bulk immunization uploads to the county’s data lake will strengthen population-level insights.  

The team is also advancing a FHIR-based cancer registry integration and preparing for TEFCA participation, ensuring alignment with national interoperability standards and positioning Fairfax as a leader in modern public health data exchange. 

As Clarin emphasized: “For us, this wasn’t just about integration, it was about enabling strategy. Envoy gives our team the freedom to focus on using data to improve health outcomes for our community.” 

Fairfax County Health Department chose Envoy because it’s part of the Rhapsody ecosystem — proven, trusted, built for healthcare. Their journey illustrates how an automated integration solution can transform a resource-limited public health agency into a leader in data modernization, delivering greater public health impact.