Leadership

Public Health Surveillance Program Office

Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations

Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS
Director

Taha A. Kass-Hout, MD, MS, is director of the Division of Informatics Solutions and Operations in the Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office (proposed). He previously served as deputy director for information services in the Division of Notifiable Diseases and Healthcare Information (DNDHI). Dr. Kass-Hout has more than 15 years of professional experience in health, public health, and informatics.

While DNDHI deputy director, Dr. Kass-Hout managed the BioSense program where he oversaw the program’s many features that assist state health departments and CDC in data collection, standardization, storage, analysis, and collaboration. BioSense is the first Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) program hosted completely in the Internet cloud, in alignment with the White House cloud initiative.

Implementation of Dr. Kass-Hout’s vision of BioSense and public health surveillance practice resulted in significant savings in overhead costs to CDC and state and local health jurisdictions. In turn, these savings can be used to support creation of additional jobs at all levels for increased public health disease surveillance. The new vision for BioSense incorporates innovative features such as a horizontal sharing model, which allows timely data to be shared among multiple parties, in alignment with the needs of state and local jurisdictions. Dr. Farzad Mostashari, national coordinator for health information technology at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology at HHS, praised BioSense 2.0 and publically gave it his support during a formal address in December 2011.

Dr. Kass-Hout also managed CDC’s Distribute project. First used during the influenza H1N1 pandemic, Distribute has been further developed by CDC in partnership with the International Society for Disease Surveillance. In December 2009, Distribute was acknowledged by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a model case study for open government because of the project’s voluntary participation, low cost to acquire data, and exceptional public transparency. Dr. Kass-Hout also was active in responding to the 2003 SARS outbreak, where he led the informatics and information response for the National Center for Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Kass-Hout is credited with these innovations:

• InSTEDD’s Riff—an open source social networking platform for integrated early warning and response (InSTEDD was fielded by Google in 2006). On Jan 17, 2010, the Thomson Reuters Foundation used Riff to launch a first-of-its kind, free disaster-information service for the people of Port Au Prince, Haiti. The use of Riff enabled survivors of Haiti's earthquake to receive critical information by text message directly to their phones, free of charge.
  
  
• The Global Disease Surveillance Platform (GDSP™), patent pending (WO/2008/013553-US 2009/0319295 A1)—a situation awareness platform to help predict, monitor, detect early, and enable timely response to public health events such as an influenza pandemic.



• eQuest—a just-in-time Web-based survey creation-and-analysis solution for epidemiologic and disease outbreak investigation. eQuest was the primary tool used by field epidemiologists during their investigation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. eQuest has been used in hundreds of disease outbreak investigations and in field studies conducted by public health entities at all levels.

Dr. Kass-Hout received a master-of-science degree from the University of Texas, School of Public Health, Department of Biostatistics. His medical doctor degree is from the University of Texas, Health Sciences Center, Houston. Dr. Kass-Hout also completed clinical training at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in Houston.