Role of Electronic Information Systems in Public Health Surveillance: A case Study of the North Carolina Bio- Preparedness collaborative

The North Carolina Bio-Preparedness (NCB-P) Collaborative is a unified all-hazards data resource for proactive surveillance that will provide on–demand analytical power and significantly enhance and extend vigilance and homeland security. The joint-institutional project of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / North Carolina State University / SAS proposes to aggregate and integrate local, county, regional, tribal, and state-wide data monitoring agencies and sentinel sources into a federated (shared access), secure “master data commons”.

NCB-P will increase the speed of response in identifying deleterious agents and events that compromise health, security, infrastructure, agriculture, and economic viability. Public health and emergency management workers in North Carolina will be empowered with an analytical decision-support resource, so they can more readily detect, intercept, predict and help prevent episodes that threaten public health, business and industry.

The system will leverage existing, open-source technologies from UNC's iRODS (integrated Rule-Oriented Data System) for accessing heterogeneous sources of data. The NCB-P unified federated resource will provide access to currently disparate and dissimilar local and national data sources to make them available for analysis and to inform real time decision-making. The North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative will be integrated into the statewide Health Information Exchange.