Background

In late 2007, the CDC accelerated efforts to redesign the program in order to improve collaboration with federal, state and local public health stakeholders and leverage recent advances in informatics. The BioSense program solicited input from stakeholders across the country to begin transitioning the program to meet our nation’s public health threats. As a result, BioSense has begun to evolve significantly through the adoption of recent knowledge and technological innovation.

The BioSense application, developed and hosted by the Centers’ for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is one part of the nation’s overall bioterrorism and emergency preparedness strategy.

The application monitors disease that occur due to bioterrorism or infections like influenza or other health events related to natural disasters.

The surveillance methods in BioSense address the need for identification, tracking, and management of rapidly spreading, naturally occurring events and potential bioterrorism events using advance algorithms for data analysis.

Currently, there are more than 500 entities using BioSense, including hospitals; federal, state, and local facilities; and CDC. In addition, nearly 600 healthcare facilities in some of the most populous cities in the United States are now transmitting near real-time data to BioSense.

The BioSense program, initiated in 2003/2004, is an innovative biosurveillance program designed to increase the nation's emergency preparedness through the development of a national network for real time disease detection, monitoring, and health situational awareness. BioSense functions through the secure transmissions of clinical care data from hospitals to CDC or a state or local system. The data is then analyzed, interpreted, and displayed through user interface tools that give public health and healthcare professionals various means of exploring the data sets. The program receives and displays data from 1730+ hospitals across the country. This data is used by the CDC BioIntelligence Center (BIC) to detect and monitor disease trends. Hospitals in the BioSense System include Department of Defense (DOD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, as well as private and other publicly funded healthcare institutions.

Public Health Need for BioSense

It was created as a Web-based system for use by healthcare facilities and state and local public health departments. The surveillance methods in BioSense address the need for identification, tracking, and management of rapidly spreading, naturally occurring events and potential bioterrorism events using advance algorithms for data analysis.

Specifically, BioSense will focus on:

• Data transmission to assure the secure, timely, routine receipt of health data for public health surveillance;
   
• Data analysis to develop, evaluate, and apply analytic signal detection methodologies and algorithms, and disseminate these methodologies to selected cities and states to interpret the results of the analysis, in as close to real-time as possible;
   
• Data reporting on a near real-time basis, providing useful views of the data, including time series analysis and geospatial displays for colleagues in state and local health departments, as well as for CDC programmatic staff ;
   
• Public Health Response to provide local data to state and local partners and support their use and interpretation of these data for investigations, outbreak response, and public health interventions.

Current Data Sources

Current data sources include:

• VA and DoD healthcare facilities;


• Private hospitals and hospital systems;


• State-run healthcare systems;


• State and/or regional surveillance systems;


• National laboratories.

The Future of BioSense

Building on the foundation of the BioSense program, we plan to implement a fully functional national system capable of giving decision makers a clear picture of the nation’s health.

The BioSense program will focus on building state and local capacity to track public health events, while also supporting public health workforce development and scientific research and innovation.