Quitugua Teresa

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) has the responsibility to integrate, analyze, and share the nation’s biosurveillance information provided from capabilities distributed across public and private sectors. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts.

Objective

To evaluate different government and commercial air travel route and volume data sources for utility in determining likely points of arrival and subsequent spread of communicable diseases originating from outbreaks outside the United States.

The NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact. NBIC serves as a bridge between Federal, State, Local, Territorial, and Tribal entities to conduct biosurveillance across human, animal, plant, and environmental domains. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts.

To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a variety of data sets, including open source information, to provide comprehensive coverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBIC Biofeeds is a digital tool designed to improve the efficiency of reviewing and analyzing large volumes of open source reporting by biosurveillance analysts on a daily basis; moreover, the system provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored feeds allowing NBIC to better meet the specific information needs of individual, interagency partners. The tool is currently under development by the Department of Energy (DOE), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and it is in a testing and evaluation phase supported by NBIC biosurveillance subject matter experts. Integration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) is also underway. NBIC Biofeeds Version 1 is expected to be fully operational in Fiscal Year 2017. 

Objective

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is developing a scalable, flexible open source data collection, analysis, and dissemination tool to support biosurveillance operations by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its federal interagency partners. 

NBIC collects, analyzes, and shares key biosurveillance information to support the nation’s response to biological events of concern. Integration of this information enables early warning and shared situational awareness to inform critical decision making, and direct response and recovery efforts.

DTRA J9 CB leads DoD S&T to anticipate, defend, and safeguard against chemical and biological threats for the warfighter and the nation.

These agencies have partnered to meet the evolving needs of the biosurveillance community and address gaps in technology and data sharing capabilities. High-profile events such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the West African Ebola outbreak, and the recent emergence of Zika virus disease have underscored the need for integration of disparate biosurveillance systems to provide a more functional infrastructure. This allows analysts and others in the community to collect, analyze, and share relevant data across organizations securely and efficiently. Leveraging existing biosurveillance efforts provides the federal public health community, and its partners, with a comprehensive interagency platform that enables engagement and data sharing. 

Objective

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Chemical and Biological Technologies Department (DTRA J9 CB) have partnered to co- develop the Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE), an emerging capability that aims to provide a virtual, customizable analyst workbench that integrates health and non-health data. This partnership promotes engagement between diverse health surveillance entities to increase awareness and improve decision-making capabilities.