The Birth and Early Life of the Public Health Informatics Research Grid

The Public Health Research Informatics Grid represents a collaboration between NCPHI (CDC), local public health departments, and universities.  The next phase of this research is to include participation by state public health departments, HIEs, RIOs, hospitals and international public health entities.  Our research goal is to determine the viability of grid technology to solve pressing public health informatics needs relative to data, workflow and outcomes. Data management is an essential component that often requires physical experimentation and measurement to enable the digitization of medical data for standard network transit, storage, analysis and visualization.  This session will elaborate on how actual research is changing the way public health may approach distributed data access on the scale of the Internet, and it’s potential impact upon approaches taken by PHIN and other National Health IT Initiatives.
The ability to poll, query and access data and information at multiple jurisdictions locally, regionally and nationally in a dynamic distributed fashion may offer tremendous benefits to public health practice.  In this session, the presenter will speak about the current stage of research in the CDC / NCPHI lab relative to distributed queries, the origin and thinking behind this type of research, and the open source governance model being tested.  The presenter will also address the future of this research and the methodology for sustainability.