Regenstrief Institute wins CDC contract, funding for informatics research

“The Centers for Disease Control has awarded the Regenstrief Institute at the Indiana University School of Medicine a $2.6 million contract to improve rapid response and emergency management of infectious disease outbreaks.
The funding will allow researchers from the Regenstrief Institute to develop public health informatics solutions to combat outbreaks of such public health hazards as anthrax, plague and other infectious diseases.”
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 12 March 2008

Bridging Radiology and Public Health: The Emerging Field of Radiologic Public Health Informatics

“Radiology and public health have an emerging opportunity to collaborate, in which radiology’s vast supply of imaging data can be integrated into public health information systems for epidemiologic assessments and responses to population health problems. Fueling the linkage of radiology and public health include (i) the transition from analog film to digital formats, enabling flexible use of radiologic data; (ii) radiology’s role in imaging across nearly all medical and surgical subspecialties, which establishes a foundation for a consolidated and uniform database of images and reports for public health use; and (iii) the use of radiologic data to characterize disease patterns in a population occupying a geographic area at one time and to characterize disease progression over time via follow-up examinations. The backbone for this integration is through informatics projects such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and RadLex constructing terminology libraries and ontologies, as well as algorithms integrating data from the electronic health record and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine Structured Reporting. Radiology’s role in public health is being tested in disease surveillance systems for outbreak detection and bioterrorism, such as the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Challenges for radiologic public health informatics include refining the systems and user interfaces, adhering to privacy regulations, and strengthening collaborative relations among stakeholders, including radiologists and public health officials. Linking radiology with public health, radiologic public health informatics is a promising avenue through which radiology can contribute to public health decision making and health policy.”
Abstract
Daniel J. Mollura, John A. Carrino, Diane L. Matuszak, Zaruhi R. Mnatsakanyan, John Eng, Protagoras Cutchis, Steven M. Babin, Carol Sniegoski and Joseph S. Lombardo, Journal of the American College of Radiology, Volume 5, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 174-181, doi:10.1016/j.jacr.2007.08.020

How Smartdust, Souveillance, Web 3.0, and Personalized Genetics Will Transform the Future of Medical Diagnostics

“There has been a flurry of debate in the military, industrial, and privacy sectors on “smartdust” and the concept of “souveillance” - but no one has yet realized this technology is poised to springboard into medicine and transform medical diagnostics. Here I wanted to give you an overview of what this idea is and why you should keep your eye on it.”
Article
Steven F. Palter,  Docinthemachine, 25 February 2008

The Healthcare Challenge

Last week the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has declared Health informatics as one of the grand engineering challenges of our time.
They list a number of aspects that are part of that challenge, to start with interoperability and medical records. Their next comment is on the availability of information to professionals: “Doctors suffering from information overload need systematic electronic systems for finding information to treat specific patients and decision support systems to offer “just in time, just for me” advice at the point of care“. This sounds very much like the inventories and knowledge centres ICMCC has been focusing on during the almost 4 years of its existence.”
Article
Lodewijk Bos, ICMCC Blog, 20 February 2008

The Healthcare Challenge

Last week the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has declared Health Informatics as one of the grand engineering challenges of our time.
They list a number of aspects that are part of that challenge, to start with interoperability and medical records. Their next comment is on the availability of information to professionals: “Doctors suffering from information overload need systematic electronic systems for finding information to treat specific patients and decision support systems to offer “just in time, just for me” advice at the point of care“. This sounds very much like the inventories and knowledge centres ICMCC has been focusing on during the almost 4 years of its existence.
Monitoring information is mentioned next as one of the tools to improve healthcare. I should have been presenting at the German KIS meeting today, but due to medical problems I was unable to attend. I was supposed to talk about “Mobile devices from a patient viewpoint” and one of the issues I wanted to raise was the fact that these devices should be unobtrusive, easy to handle and if possible self-explanatory. The NAE even completely focuses on micro technology and interoperability once more is a key element: “Seamlessly integrating the input from such devices into a health informatics system raises the networking challenge to a new level“.
In the next part of their declaration the focus changes to public health emergencies, firstly the environmental monitoring to signal possible chemical and biological attacks, followed by a large chapter on disease surveillance to tackle pandemics, one of the other focussing points in the ICMCC history.

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AEGIS: A Robust and Scalable Real-time Public Health Surveillance System

“In this report, we describe the Automated Epidemiological Geotemporal Integrated Surveillance system (AEGIS), developed for real-time population health monitoring in the state of Massachusetts. AEGIS provides public health personnel with automated near-real-time situational awareness of utilization patterns at participating healthcare institutions, supporting surveillance of bioterrorism and naturally occurring outbreaks. As real-time public health surveillance systems become integrated into regional and national surveillance initiatives, the challenges of scalability, robustness, and data security become increasingly prominent. A modular and fault tolerant design helps AEGIS achieve scalability and robustness, while a distributed storage model with local autonomy helps to minimize risk of unauthorized disclosure. The report includes a description of the evolution of the design over time in response to the challenges of a regional and national integration environment.”
Abstract
Ben Y. Reis, Chaim Kirby, Lucy E. Hadden, Karen Olson, Andrew J. McMurry, James B. Daniel, and Kenneth D. Mandl, J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2007;14:581-588

Commission unveils medical intelligence system

“The European Commission has developed a medical intelligence system that collects and sorts information from more than 1000 news and 120 public health websites in 32 languages.”
Article
Carla Moore, Digital Media Europe, 14 August 2007