BioSense
Traditional public health surveillance and investigations often involve the manual reporting of cases to public health agencies and phone calls to healthcare providers for more detailed patient chart information. The timeliness, completeness, and breadth of coverage of these manual processes can be problematic especially during a public health emergency. With increasing amounts of healthcare and health-related data in electronic form and a national focus on the value of exchanging health data electronically, there are now opportunities to use existing electronic data to better support public health functions.BioSense is a national program to advance this new type of biosurveillance at the national, state, and local levels. Using streams of health data and advanced algorithms for analyzing and visualizing these data streams, the new methods supported by BioSense address the needs of monitoring for infectious diseases, for biological and chemical attacks, and for naturally occurring emergencies. BioSense supports the situational awareness necessary to confirm and identify possible events, to track and manage their size and spread, and to provide public health and government decision makers the information needed to manage preparedness and response. BioSense was developed to support early event detection and represents an approach to public health surveillance based on the secondary use of health care and health related data. The target for public health receiving these data is to support early detection of a Bioterrorism event, but also of significant importance is supporting the many information needs associated with identifying subsequent cases, identifying where the event is and how big it is so that appropriate investigation and response can occur.
Specifically, the BioSense Initiative has been developed to:
- Provide real-time national surveillance and event detection and management critical in containing and minimizing bioterrorist threats on the United States;
- Support the secure connection of health care and health related data from the health care system nationally;
- Include a new software system at the CDC to act as a national safety net and support data analysis in CDC’s newly established BioIntelligence Center; and
- Receive, analyze and evaluate health data from numerous data sources such as emergency rooms, ambulatory care physicians and clinics, pharmacies and clinical laboratories.
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