The objective of this project is to provide disease trend monitoring software tools that maintain direct access to surveillance data sources and support prompt analysis and public health actions. Specific goals in terms of what the proposed system will achieve for a public health department: * Real-time disease surveillance and decision support oriented toward immediate response * Promote sharing of data, analysis, and knowledge across the health department * Provide ready graphical views of temporal and spatial disease patterns as plots and maps This project will take advantage of recent technological innovations that allow direct software and data sharing, timely data access, and transparent data integration and synthesis. Significant progress in distributed object computing (CORBA) provides the ideal opportunity to explore innovative models for providing modular data analysis and interpretation support tools. Both computing and data resources can be fully integrated and securely provided over computer networks. The ultimate target is to deliver opportune analytic and visualization tools capable of accessing and integrating multiple data sources, incorporating new cases submitted since last run for efficient, proactive monitoring in a secure and responsive system.
Disease trend monitoring techniques and novel visualization approaches can be incorporated in surveillance systems as analytic components. These sorts of decision support tools, able to convert raw data into informative output and accessible from the Web or any networked client machine, should prove valuable to a variety of analysts responsible for disease monitoring.
