OMS Enterprise Architecture Evaluation

Abstract:

In the world of informatics and technological advances, sometimes the actual work of the public health practitioner targeted to benefit or improve does not. Trends toward Service Oriented Architectures, Grids, and Business Intelligence do not make sense unless they support the activities performed by Public Health. This years theme, “Collaboration at the Crossroads” makes perfect sense to mitigate the above mentioned disconnect between informatics and work practices.  This presentation will provide an approach for collaboration leveraging applied Enterprise Architecture and a repeatable process to facilitate Communities of Practice to define their subject area from which informatics can be derived.

Within the Division of Integrated Surveillance Systems and Services at CDC, we have obtained funding to resurrect the Outbreak Management System (OMS), which had its funding paused last year.  The funding was paused for reasons mentioned above.  Although the project did facilitate conference calls with stakeholders, mostly state and local health departments, the national perspective was not included and therefore the system's capabilities did not support the work practices of those who sponsored the effort.

To ensure the proper stewardship of the project, funding was restored with what the sponsors called an Enterprise Architecture Review.  This review was not about starting over, but to go back the community with a plan and to build a strategy to move forward with the OMS tool.  The plan was to begin by engaging the community and leveraging a process developed by the Department of the Interior (DOI) to build an architecture based on work practices and environments to those who manage outbreaks or would benefit from outbreak data, not about how the software would be designed. From there existing informatics can be objectively scored to their relevance to outbreak management and future innovation can be designed to improve the capability of the practitioner.