National Health IT Initiatives are helping to advance the state of automated disease surveillance through incentives to health care facilities to implement electronic medical records and provide data to health departments and use collaborative systems to enhance quality of care and patient safety. While the emergence of a standard for the transfer of surveillance data is urgently needed, migrating from the current practice to a future standard can be a source of frustration. This project represents collaboration among the CDC BioSense Program, Tarrant County Public Health and the ESSENCE Team at the Johns Hopkins University APL. The objectives of the project are to: develop reusable meaningful use messaging software for ingestion health information exchange data available in Tarrant County, demonstrate the use of this data for supporting surveillance, demonstrate the ability to share data for regional and national surveillance using the messaging guide model, and demonstrate how this model can be proliferated among health departments that use ESSENCE by investigating the potential use of cloud technology. The presentation will outline the steps for achieving this goal.