“What Can the Grid Do for Me?” – A Public Health Use Case for Grid Computing Architecture

Introduction: The PHI-RG PoC projects at CDC/NCPHI have proved the technical feasibility of deploying grid architecture at US public health agencies and academic health organizations.  “Public Health Use Case for Grid” project underscores benefits of the PHI-RG PoC projects to the end-users by responding to their question: “What can the Grid do for me?”
Methods: The project involves studying end-users’ information processing and exchange requirements during public health practice scenarios by following ‘A day in the life of a County Epidemiologist’. We selected the public health case reporting use case (PHCR-UC) developed by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) and mapped the abstracted PHCR-UC steps to the public health scenario. We then mapped the individual business processes to the PHI-RG’s ongoing and planned PoC projects. We gathered detailed information about current information exchange and processing such as the following: What information is collected, from whom, how, in what time frame and in which format?
Results: Our draft ‘Public Health Use Case for Grid Computing Architecture’ follows a US county epidemiologist’s routine workflow as she starts her day by ‘Building a database of cheese heroin morbidity and mortality.’ One of the business processes for this task – ‘Try to get data from Poison Control Center’ – was mapped to Code: 8.1.1.1a of the PHCR-UC, described as: ‘Alternate Action: Request information by utilizing information exchanges.’ PHI-RG PoC project ‘Quicksilver’ addresses this business process by querying the National Poison Control System data-service and displaying the query results on a choropleth map shaded according to clinical effect thresholds established by the user. A time-series graph is displayed using the FLOT open source charting API. Conclusion: This project informs the ongoing and planned PHI-RG PoC projects, and illustrates the benefits of the proposed Public Health Grid to the stakeholders’ workflow.