Center for Disease Control and Prevention
Division of Notifiable Diseases and Healthcare Information
1600 Clifton Road, NE
MS E-97
Atlanta,
GA
USA
30329
tik2@cdc.gov
Biographical Sketch:
Dr. Kass-Hout serves as the Deputy Director for Information Science, & BioSense Program Manager for the Division of Notifiable Diseases and Healthcare Information at CDC’s Public Health Surveillance Program Office. Presently, he is managing the BioSense Program and its Redesign effort based on input and guidance from local, state, and federal partners. The goal of the redesign is to create a new BioSense, which coordinates and links existing health monitoring surveillance systems, and improve BioSense system's utility through a user-centered approach. The Redesign effort will enable rapid and enhanced interchange of information for all hazards providing regional (i.e., multistate) and national situation awareness of multiple health outcomes and syndromes. The Redesign effort is consistent with the 2006 Pandemic All Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA), and 2007 Homeland Security Presidential Directive (HSPD-21), both of which call for regional and nationwide public health situation awareness, through an interoperable network of systems, built on existing state and local situation awareness capability. He improved internal contract management which resulted in ~40% of Program savings that are being applied directly to increase funding to support state and local health departments for syndromic surveillance and situation awareness efforts. He serves as a member of the EHR Meaningful Use Advisory Group and the Syndromic Surveillance lead for this group at CDC. The Advisory Group is co-sponsored by the Office of Surveillance, Epidemiology and Laboratory Services (OSELS) and the Office of State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support (OSTLTS). He provides strategic planning to ensure that CDC launches a comprehensive, coordinated approach to support development of state and local health department capacity to accept information from EHRs, including syndromic surveillance, immunization registries, and electronic laboratory reporting between laboratories and the health departments. He works to advance state and local health department capacity for electronic exchange of health information to support public health surveillance and to improve the quality of health care by assuring coordination of resources in public health practice and informatics. With his 15 years of experience in health, public health, and informatics, his expertise has been utilized to manage the Distribute project at CDC, developed after the first wave of the H1N1 pandemic. Distribute tracked over 67 million visits encompassing >40% of total Emergency Departments in the US with >140,000 visits/day during the second wave of H1N1. Distribute was acknowledged in December 2009 by the White House Office of Science, and Technology Policy as a model case study for Open Government based on its voluntary participation, low cost to acquire data, and unprecedented public transparency. State and local public health departments used the Distribute system to understand the progression of disease in neighboring regions, while CDC used the system to provide a timely regional or national picture. In 2005, he served as a Senior Medical Advisor to the United States’ Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN) Prototype. During the response to the 2003 SARS outbreak, he led the U.S. informatics and information task at the U.S. National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).