Public Health Informatics Research for Future Disease Monitoring

The Public Health Grid is one of several key initiatives that will provide public health officials with technology and tools that could revolutionize the way surveillance and epidemiological investigations are performed. The goal of the grid is to create a collaborative environment that unites local/state/regional public health agencies with Federal partners to facilitate nationwide health situational awareness. The grid has the potential to rapidly advance public health’s disease surveillance mission given the wide variety of data, information, and services that could be quickly assembled to support urgent public health issues. Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) connected to the grid could provide a wealth of clinical data for disease monitoring. Services are needed to manage the data and extract populations following specific case definitions of current interest to public health departments. To fully exploit the data, analytic services must be available that intelligently fuse data and information while managing alerts that are of little relevance to the current monitoring/investigation activities. Data and information must be presented to users in a way that visually shows associations and trends. Information must be shared among public health organizations. Data containing hypothetical outbreaks must be available as a service for research, development, training and exercises. This presentation will provide a review of current automation of disease monitoring systems and discuss the initial development of services on the grid to support public health’s disease surveillance mission.