Rods

Abstract

The Real-time Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) system was initiated by the RODS Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh in 1999. The system is now an open source project under the GNU license. The RODS development effort has been organized into seven functional areas: overall design, data collection, syndrome classification, database and data warehousing, outbreak detection algorithms, data access, and user interfaces. Each functional area has a coordinator for the open source project, and there is an overall coordinator responsible for the architecture, overall integration of components, and overall quality of the JAVA source code. Figure 8-1 illustrates the RODS' system architecture. The RODS system as a syndromic surveillance application was originally deployed in Pennsylvania, Utah, and Ohio. As of 2006, RODS performs emergency department surveillance for other states of California, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, New Jersey, Nevada, and Wyoming through an ASP model at the University of Pittsburgh, and through local installations in Taiwan, Canada, Mississippi, Michigan, California, and Texas. As of June 2006, about 20 regions with more than 200 healthcare facilities connected to RODS in real-time. It was also deployed during the 2002 Winter Olympics (Espino et al., 2004). It also serves as the user interface for national over-the-counter medication sales surveillance data collected through the NRDM.