The applicant is an Instructor in Pediatrics at Children's Hospital, Boston and a faculty member in the Children's Hospital Informatics Program. The applicant completed an NLM-funded fellowship in informatics and will be receiving a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Stanford University this September. The applicant is also currently completing training in General Preventive Medicine and Public Health and has completed a post-doctoral fellowship in epidemiology and biostatistics at Emory University. The applicant plans to pursue a research career at the intersection of informatics and public health through a joint appointment in an academic pediatric infectious disease department and a medical informatics program. The mentor is Dr. Isaac Kohane, Director of the Children's Hospital Informatics Program division that has a staff of 40 including 15 faculty and extensive computational resources, funded through several NIH grants. We believe recent developments in information and communications technology, such as advanced knowledge-based voice recognition or hybrid decision support and analytics, could vastly improve our ability to respond to and manage large-scale outbreaks and public health disasters in the country. We propose to carry out a study identifying communication and analysis needs in public health departments and develop a system to that provides an appropriate automated solution to the outbreak investigation and management problem. Our method builds on the considerable advances in the last 5 years in the computer science of automated speech recognition and the development of the rapidly deployable call center infrastructure. We propose to build a system that can (1) provide decision support to help epidemiologists rapidly construct and analyze results from voice-enabled questionnaires and (2) use automated speech recognition-based call center technology to interview large numbers of people in very short periods of time for real-time analysis.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Office of The Director, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (ODCDC)
Type
Research Scientist Development Award - Research & Training (K01)
Project #
5K01CD000090-03
Application #
7121237
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZCD1-EWS (K1))
Program Officer
Clark, Susan C
Project Start
2004-09-30
Project End
2008-09-29
Budget Start
2006-09-30
Budget End
2008-09-29
Support Year
3
Fiscal Year
2006
Total Cost
$322,305
Indirect Cost
Name
Children's Hospital Boston
Department
Type
DUNS #
076593722
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02115