Lober Bill

Cost-effective, flexible and innovative tools that integrate disparate data sets and allow sharing of information between geographically dispersed collaborators are needed to improve public health surveillance practice. Gossamer Health (Good Open Standards System for Aggregating, Monitoring and Electronic Reporting of Health), http://gossamerhealth.org, is an open source system, suitable for server or "cloud" deployment, that is designed for the collection, analysis, interpretation and visualization of syndromic surveillance data and other indicators to monitor population health. The Gossamer Health system combines applied public health informatics research conducted at the University of Washington Center for Public Health Informatics and Washington State Department of Health, in collaboration with other state and local health jurisdictions, the International Society for Disease Surveillance and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Objective

The goal of this work is to make available to the public health community an open source system that makes available in a standards-based, modular fashion the basic tools required to conduct automated indicator-based population health surveillance. These tools may be deployed in a flexible fashion on health department servers, in the Amazon EC2 cloud, or in any combination, and are coupled through well-defined standards-based interfaces.

Cross-jurisdictional sharing of public health syndrome data is useful for many reasons, among them to provide a larger regional or national view of activity and to determine if unusual activity observed in one jurisdiction is atypical. Considerable barriers to sharing of public health data exist, including maintaining control of potentially sensitive data and having informatics systems available to take and view data. The Distribute project [1,2] has successfully enabled cross-jurisdictional sharing of ILI syndrome data through a community of practice approach to facilitate control and trust, and a distributed informatics solution. The Gossamer system [3] incorporates methods used in several UW projects including Distribute. Gossamer has been designed in a modular fashion to be hosted using virtual or physical machines, including inside cloud environments. Two modules of the Gossamer system are designed for aggregate data sharing, and provide a subset of the Distribute functionality. The Distribute and Gossamer systems have been used for ad-hoc sharing in three different contexts; sharing of common ILI data for research into syndrome standardization, sharing syndromic data for specific events (2010 Olympics) and for pilot regional sharing of respiratory lab results. Two additional projects are underway to share specific syndromes of recent interest: alcohol related and heat related ED visits.

Objective

To demonstrate how rapid adhoc sharing of surveillance data can be achieved through informatics methods developed for the Distribute project.

The University of Washington has been working since 2000 with partners in Washington State to advance bioterrorism (BT) detection and preparedness. This project collects data on patients presenting with influenza-like illnesses and other potentially BT-related syndromes at emergency departments and primary care clinics (Kitsap, Clallam, and Jefferson counties) using a secure automated informatics approach. Local health jurisdiction epidemiologists use a web-based interface to view de-identified data and use a version of CDC’s EARS disease detection algorithms to watch for variances in patterns of diagnoses, volume, time and space as part of the public health real-time disease surveillance system. This processed hospital data is also made available back to the officials and administrators at the reporting hospital.

Objective

To understand GIS issues in a rural-tourban setting and demonstrate limitations of ZIPcode-only approaches compared to census tract and block approaches.