The objective of the JHU/APL Center of Excellence for Public Health Informatics is to perform research and development to fill gaps in current public health disease surveillance and response informatics. These gaps have been identified by interactions with health departments and knowledge of the research currently being performed within the community. Projects have been identified in three areas: (1) data capture/sharing for the public health surveillance and response; (2) prospective anomaly detection and event classification to improve the timeliness, sensitivity and specificity of outbreak detection, and (3) planning, training and analysis in a synthetic environment. All three projects will apply PHIN standards. ? ? The JHU/APL has assembled a team of physicians, public health researchers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers to develop, implement and evaluate new technology for early recognition of infectious disease public health emergencies. Technologies/techniques to be investigated include: advanced information technology, such as innovative data collection devices, multi-mode data collection techniques, networking; linguistics for sharing multi-lingual data; univariate and multivariate analysis, data mining techniques and automated learning in support of detection/characterization algorithm development; and PHIN standards. The Center has legal collaboration agreements in place with health departments in the National Capital Region (NCR) (Maryland, District of Columbia and Virginia) and the Public Health Agency of Canada for the development and evaluation of new surveillance technologies. The NCR and PHAC user base will be called upon to ensure the relevance of the Center's projects to public health. ? ? An enhanced informatics capability will provide more timely and accurate detection and characterization information to public health practitioners in the event of a disease outbreak or bioterrorist attack, while also providing planning and training capability. ? ? ?
