Beyond syndromic surveillance: The North Carolina bio-preparedness collaborative

Background: The North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative (NCB-Prepared) is a public-private partnership to develop, test, and implement an advanced biosurveillance system beginning in North Carolina. It is a collaborative effort of academic, government, and industry leaders focused on developing a local, bottom-up approach to public health responsiveness and awareness.

The Collaborative has created a comprehensive statewide biosurveillance system to provide early outbreak detection and situational awareness of health events. It supports the health care community to better understand how the biosphere relates to disease activity and threats to human or animal health. It offers a clearer view of the day-to-day public health picture and support decisions and responses to protect and enhance lives.

Objective/Purpose: 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 can 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.

Methods: NCB-Prepared applies data access and analytic technology to stimulate and enhance data resource sharing between agencies and has created a system for potential adoption by other states that enhances early event detection, situational awareness, and decision support via advanced analytics.

Results: 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.