Schwantes Collin

NBIC is charged with enhancing the capability of the Federal Government to enable early warning and shared situational awareness of acute biological events to support better decisions through rapid identification, characterization, localization, and tracking. A key aspect of this mission is the requirement to integrate and collaborate with federal and, state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government agencies. NBIC develops and disseminates a variety of products to its stakeholders, including daily reports, ad-hoc reports, analytic collaborations, and leadership briefings upon request. Stakeholders interact with and utilize NBIC’s products in different ways, depending on the mission and jurisdiction involved. Specific collaborations with individual stakeholders are most frequent and evident during major infectious disease events, such as the recent Zika epidemic in the Americas and the associated microcephaly and other neurological disorders PHEIC. Collaborative efforts and known outcomes among varying levels of government are described in detail below in order to highlight NBIC’s integration focus and capabilities in this role.

Objective:

An important part of the National Biosurveillance Integration Center’s (NBIC) mission is collaboration with federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments for the purpose of enhancing early warning, shared situational awareness, and related decision support for infectious disease events. Several such collaborations occurred at multiple jurisdictional levels during the recent Zika epidemic in the Americas and the associated microcephaly and other neurological disorders Public Health Event of International Concern (PHEIC). The collaborations and their known outcomes from this major infectious disease event are described below, and NBIC stands ready to support similar efforts for future events.

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. 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 analyzing large volumes of open source reporting and increase the number of relevant insights gleaned from this dataset. Moreover, the tool provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored, electronic message notifications in near-real time so that NBIC can share specific information of interest to its interagency partners in a timely manner. NBIC is deploying the tool for operational use by the Center and eventual use by federal partners with biosurveillance mission objectives. Core functionality for data collection, curation, and dissemination useful to other federal agencies was implemented, and NBIC is incorporating custom taxonomies for capturing metadata specific to the unique missions of NBIC partners.

Objective:

The National Biosurveillance Integration Center (NBIC) is deploying 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.