BioSense Next Generation: A Federated Approach to Biosurveillance

BACKGROUND: BioSense is an innovative biosurveillance program designed to increase the nation's emergency preparedness through the development of a national network for real time disease detection, monitoring, and health situational awareness. In the last year, BioSense has solicited input from stakeholders across the country to transition the program to meet the nation’s public health threats. Stakeholders were asked to provide input to the program’s operations, requirements, direction, scientific contributions, and technology selection. This input informed the creation of a Strategic Plan that focuses on the development of local, state and national real time biosurveillance capabilities, enhancement of communications across all levels of public health, and enhancement of linkages between public health and the clinical care system. STRATEGY: The target is for BioSense to reflect the structure and operational realities of the public health system. Namely, the system should be a federation of national, state, and local components each sharing data on a public health grid. Each organizational entity will retain control of its own data. The system will be sufficiently flexible so that the level of detail shared by any organization in the system can adjust to match public health needs of local, regional, and national authorities. BENEFITS: Building informatics capacity at the state and local levels contributes to coordinated and consistent efforts across the biosurveillance community. The technical approach allows state and local data stewards to determine the access levels for other jurisdictions and provides an open-source, customizable solution for viewing aggregated information shared by others. The re-usable and secure public health infrastructure will support routine public health practice in addition to early event detection across multiple stakeholders. CONCLUSION: The need for a national surveillance network remains strong. Through rigorous evaluation and quality improvement, BioSense poised to continue to meet the nation’s goals for biosurveillance preparedness.