CD05-109 Abstracts
1 P01 CD000270-01 - JHU/APL Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics
LOMBARDO, JOSEPH
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The objective of the JHU/APL Center of Excellence for Public Health Informatics is to perform research and development to fill gaps in current public health disease surveillance and response informatics. These gaps have been identified by interactions with health departments and knowledge of the research currently being performed within the community. Projects have been identified in three areas: (1) data capture/sharing for the public health surveillance and response; (2) prospective anomaly detection and event classification to improve the timeliness, sensitivity and specificity of outbreak detection, and (3) planning, training and analysis in a synthetic environment. All three projects will apply PHIN standards. The JHU/APL has assembled a team of physicians, public health researchers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers to develop, implement and evaluate new technology for early recognition of infectious disease public health emergencies. Technologies/techniques to be investigated include: advanced information technology, such as innovative data collection devices, multi-mode data collection techniques, networking; linguistics for sharing multi-lingual data; univariate and multivariate analysis, data mining techniques and automated learning in support of detection/characterization algorithm development; and PHIN standards. The Center has legal collaboration agreements in place with health departments in the National Capital Region (NCR) (Maryland, District of Columbia and Virginia) and the Public Health Agency of Canada for the development and evaluation of new surveillance technologies. The NCR and PHAC user base will be called upon to ensure the relevance of the Center's projects to public health. An enhanced informatics capability will provide more timely and accurate detection and characterization information to public health practitioners in the event of a disease outbreak or bioterrorist attack, while also providing planning and training capability.
1 P01 CD000275-01 - NYC Center of Excellence for Public Health Informatics
MOSTASHARI, FARZAD
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The proposed New York City Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics is a collaborative effort led by theNew York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) and supported by the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics (DBMI) and the Institute for Urban Family Health (IUFH), a network of Federally Qualified Health Center. This Center is distinguished by virtue of its public health leadership and mission, in addition to scientific rigor and depth. The unifying scientific theme of our Center for the next three years will be Using Health Information Technology to Meet Public Health Challenges. We shall focus especially on emerging public health threats such as bioterrorism, pandemic influenza, and antibiotic resistance, as well as existing health threats with the highest burden and/or preventability, such as chronic diseases, HIV, substance abuse and mental health. We will demonstrate the potential of information technology to transform public health capabilities through three perspectives- that of the patient/ consumer, the health care provider, and the public health practitioner. Goals. The overall goals of the Center are to develop, disseminate, and demonstrate: (1) A Personal Health Record that incorporates public health priorities and cognitive research to empower patients in improving their preventive care. (2) An electronic clinical decision support system that incorporates public health priorities and epidemiologic data to empower clinicians in providing better preventive and acute care (3) Electronic health information exchange from clinical information systems that improves public health surveillance of antibiotic resistance and emerging health issues.
1 P01 CD000261-01 – Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics
OBERLE, MARK W
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The University of Washington proposes to establish the Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics: Improving the Public's Health through Information Integration. Partners include the Washington Department of Health, Kitsap County Health District, the Public Health Informatics Institute, and Inland Northwest Health Services. This Center will focus on three research topics: Project 1 (Surveillance Integration and Decision Support) will develop public health surveillance methods within the emerging health information infrastructure. We will: 1) develop methods by which regional health information organizations can enhance public health surveillance; 2) develop and evaluate a probabilistic decision support system classifier for disease surveillance; and 3) investigate the usability of a web survey-assessment system for population tracking and disease reporting. Project 2 (Customizable Knowledge Management Repository System for Prevention: Design, Development, and Evaluation) will develop an interactive digital knowledge management system to support the collection, management, and retrieval of public health documents, data, earning objects, and tools. The focus will be the development of tools, including concept mapping services that will provide rapid access to answers from a variety of key resources, including the "gray literature". The system will focus on the application of natural language processing and information visualization techniques. Components will include a knowledge repository system, integrative web services and a role-based user interface to support access to information resources for enhanced decision-making by practitioners. The long-term goal is to create an environment in which practitioners can pose questions in "plain English" and receive answers to their questions rather than simply a list of possible places to look for answers. Project 3 Supporting Integration: Work Process, Change Management and System Modeling) will: 1) refine and validate an integrated model of public health information technology work; 2) provide a Change Management Toolkit to support public health agencies in making changes to current practice called for by the integrated model; and 3) build a Virtual Public Health Information Technology Environment to serve as a testbed and to explore informatics challenges. These projects are supported by three cores: Administration Core (Core A), Epidemiology and Biostatistics Science Core (Core B), and Technology and Design Science Core (Core C).
1 P01 CD000260-01 – Enhancing Public Health through Electronic Medical and Personal Health Records
PLatT, RICHARD
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics will be a partnership of three principal entities: the Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, the Harvard-MIT-Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The Center has expertise in design and use of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), Personally Controlled Health Records (PCHRs), and electronic public health reporting and communication systems. The center will link these disparate systems by developing scalable information infrastructures to enable information exchange between individuals, health care providers and public health authorities. During the initial funding period, the Center will conduct two projects that build on existing infrastructure to enhance communications to improve public health practices. Both will yield products that can be widely disseminated and readily adopted. This work will be informed by collaboration with a statewide regional health information organization (RHIO). The Center will create a new software solution, Electronic medical record Support for Public health practice (ESP). ESP will leverage existing data in EMRs by providing secure, PHIN and HIPAA compliant communications between clinicians and public health authorities. ESP will initiate reporting to public health authorities when data entered into EMRs meet criteria for reportable conditions. ESP will also receive and respond to electronic queries from public health authorities when additional clinical information is required for laboratory reported cases. ESP will also include new statistical methods for identifying spatio-temporal dusters from data residing in EMRs. Although initially focusing on STDs and asthma, ESP will address the broad range of reportable conditions of interest to public health authorities. It will be designed as a scalable, configurable system to work with a wide array of EMRs and health department information systems. The Center will also enhance the capabilities of PCHRs to add bi-directional communications between individuals and public health authorities to the PCHRs' existing communications capabilities between individuals and providers. These new capabilities will allow collection of specific risk information and the delivery of highly customized advice regarding specific recommended actions. Although these capabilities will be applicable to a wide range of health conditions, the initial focus will be on improving influenza immunization rates in high-risk populations. There will be a bi-directional link with a state immunization registry. The utility of this system will be demonstrated through its successful deployment in a large health plan that includes both technology rich and poor practices. In addition, the Center will assume a leadership role in public health informatics by participating in national and regional informatics initiatives, through training programs and other scholarly academic activities.
1 P01 CD000284-01 - Research Center of Excellence in Public Informatics
SAMORE, MatTHEW H
We propose to create the Public Health Informatics, Decision-support, Evaluation, Analysis, and Surveillance (IDEAS) Center. Its theme will be system alignment and data integration to support the public health functions of preparedness, evaluation, surveillance, analysis, decision-making, and response. The Center will be housed in the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah, which is one of four National Library of Medicine (NLM)/Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Public Health Informatics training program site. It will bring together academia, state and local health departments, integrated health care delivery systems, a successful Community Health Information Network (CHIN) and developing Regional Health Information Organization (RHIO), and myriad local, regional, and national public health and clinical data resources. The Center will unite the pursuit of state of the art research into public health informatics with a network of investigators, public health leaders and practitioners, hospital and clinic health care providers, computer scientists, and healthcare and community leaders. The research aims of the Public Health IDEAS Center address key problems in public health, clinical care, and public health informatics. We will develop and evaluate methods to improve accuracy of data linkage of patient records from multiple data sources and locations through probabilistic matching. The challenge of coordinating public health and health care system responses to threats to patient safety will be investigated. Reporting and monitoring functions of public health will be matched with education and quality improvement activities, using surveillance and analytic tools that are based on linked patient data. We will implement information technologies that support communication between providers and public health personnel, enhance decision-making capacity, and improve the efficiency of retrieval of data for investigation of infectious disease and other public health related events. Finally, we will develop and apply advanced modeling, simulation, and geographic information systems to better inform public health policy- and decisionmaking, not just for situations of high uncertainty and high risk, but also to improve control of more familiar infections. Our driving goal is to generate research findings that are widely generalizable for public health and its health care partners at the local, state, and national levels.
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Page last modified: July 22, 2008
Content source: Office of the Chief Science Officer (OCSO)
