Public health affinity domain: A standards-based surveillance system solution

Abstract

The negative impact of infectious disease on contemporary society has the potential to be considerably greater than in decades past due to the growing interdependence among nations of the world. In the absence of worldwide public health standards-based networks, the ability to monitor and respond quickly to such outbreaks is limited. In order to tackle such threats, IBM Haifa Research Lab and IBM Almaden Research Lab developed a PHAD implementation which consists of an information technology infrastructure for the public health community leveraging the Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative and important standards. This system enables sharing of data generated at clinical and public health institutions across proprietary systems and political borders. The ability to share public health data electronically paves the way for sophisticated and advanced analysis tools to visualize the population health, detect outbreaks, determine the effectiveness of policy, and perform forecast modeling. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.