Information systems play a central role in developing an effective comprehensive approach to prevent, detect, respond to, and manage infectious disease outbreaks of animals and humans. Currently, a large amount of animal and public health infectious disease data is being collected by various laboratories, health care providers, and government agencies at local, state, national, and international levels. Furthermore, many agencies have developed information access, analysis, and reporting systems of varying degrees of sophistication. Researchers from a wide range of backgrounds have also contributed by developing technologies to facilitate real-time data collection and sharing, and algorithms (e.g., those tailored for syndromic surveillance) to analyze collected data. In effect, recent years have witnessed the emergence of infectious disease informatics (IDI), a subfield of biomedical informatics that systematically studies these information management and analysis issues. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the appropriate academic and practitioner community members to further advance the objectives of IDI research. IDI research can be summarized as the development of the science and technologies needed for collecting, sharing, reporting, analyzing, and visualizing infectious disease data and for providing data and decision-making support for infectious disease prevention, detection, and management. Public health personnel in both federal and local agencies have long recognized the need for IT research to continue to address problems in data sharing, security, privacy, and analysis of disease data. The intent of this workshop is to bring together IDI researchers and practitioners to discuss selected IDI topics directly relevant to data sharing and analysis for real-time animal and public health surveillance.
