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.
