Background
Public Health Need for BioSense
In the past, existing health-related information systems were limited in their abilities to share data. This often resulted in the delayed transmission of vital information to local health departments, CDC, and other partners. For example, traditional public health surveillance and investigations often involved the manual reporting of cases to public health agencies, and phone calls to healthcare providers for more detailed patient chart information. Transitioning to electronic data within the clinical care community was an obstacle for a number of reasons:
- Financial concerns;
- Security/confidentiality of sensitive health information;
- Resistance to change.
The timeliness, completeness, and breadth of coverage of this
manual process proved to be problematic at best, and too slow to be
effective during a public health emergency. These combined factors
have proven the U.S. public health infrastructure to be ill prepared
for a bioterrorism event or an infectious epidemic such as pandemic
influenza.
BioSense Support for Public Health Need
BioSense is developing and implementing enhanced capabilities to
rapidly detect and monitor bioterrorism, natural disease outbreaks,
and other events of public health importance.
In addition to early event detection, BioSense will support ongoing
investigations and responses to suspected bioterrorism or outbreak
events by providing real-time health situational awareness.
BioSense conducts real-time biosurveillance and health situational
awareness through access to existing data from healthcare organizations
across the country.
The BioSense application is a Web-based system for use by healthcare
facilities and state and local public health partners. The surveillance
methods in BioSense address the need for identification, tracking, and
management of rapidly spreading, naturally occurring events and
potential bioterrorism events using advance algorithms for data
analysis.
Specifically, BioSense will focus on:
- Data transmission to assure the secure, timely, routine receipt of health data for public health surveillance;
- Data analysis to develop, evaluate, and apply analytic
signal detection methodologies and algorithms, and disseminate
these methodologies to selected cities and states to interpret
the results of the analysis, in as close to real-time as
possible;
- Data reporting on a near real-time basis, providing
useful views of the data, including time series analysis and
geospatial displays for colleagues in state and local health
departments, as well as for CDC programmatic staff ;
- Public Health Response to provide local data to state and local partners and support their use and interpretation of these data for investigations, outbreak response, and public health interventions.
BioSense receives, analyzes, and evaluates health data from numerous data sources such as emergency rooms, ambulatory care clinics, and clinical laboratories. Participation in BioSense may allow hospitals to gain information resources to help adapt to industry standards or other related purposes. For example, using standard vocabulary, such as SNOMED or LOINC codes, would serve to improve data quality, comparability, and other activities related to the development of an electronic health record. A key component of this development is the interoperability between public health and healthcare.
Current Data Sources
Current data sources include:
- VA and DoD healthcare facilities;
- Private hospitals and hospital systems;
- State-run healthcare systems;
- State and/or regional surveillance systems;
- National laboratories.
BioSense Support for CDC Goals
BioSense supports one of CDC’s four Health Protection Goals:
- People Prepared for Emerging Health Threats: People in all communities will be protected from infectious, occupational, environmental, and terrorist threats.
In addition, BioSense supports several of CDC’s Preparedness Goals.
Detect
- Decrease the time needed to classify health events as terrorism or naturally occurring in partnership with other agencies.
- Improve the timeliness and accuracy of communications regarding threats to the public’s health.
Investigate
- Decrease the time to identify causes, risk factors, and appropriate interventions for those affected by threats to the public’s health.
Control
- Decrease the time needed to provide countermeasures and health guidance to those affected by threats to the public’s health.
