Research Grid Services to Support Disease Surveillance

Research Grid Services to Support Disease Surveillance

One of the focus areas for NCPHI is the establishment of a research grid to develop and evaluate technologies and methods for the establishment of a Public Health Grid. Each of NCPHIs academic Centers of Excellence is providing services to evaluate the utility of this potentially powerful environment. The JHUAPL Center is providing a array of tools and services that demonstrate how the grid could be used to conduct disease surveillance. These services include a synthetic medical records generator that can provide developers with background data containing realistic outbreaks. Medical records are becoming available to public health through Health Information Exchanges, but few if any of these clinical data sets contain various outbreaks needed for research and development. A second service will provide the grid user the ability to identify abnormal trends in the treatment of patients through probablistic based data fusion. This analytic service will have the ability to digest medical records along with other disease indicators to identify potential health risks. A third service will be able to share the findings of a users investigations with others within the community. A demonstration of these services will be supported by the creation of a consumer application after a brief description of each of the services is given.