The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are still working on a redesign of the national biosurveillance system, and CDC officials can't say what the system will cost, the Government Accountability Office reported yesterday.

The CDC began developing the system, known as BioSense, in 2003. In response to complaints about its cost and lack of utility, the agency announced in early 2007 that it would redesign the system.

However, GAO's report, "More Detailed Plans Needed for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Redesigned BioSense Program," stated that the CDC does not expect to complete BioSense until 2012.

The agency will not complete detailed planning for the system before the end of 2009, according to the report.

BioSense collects health data from a variety of sources, including hospital emergency rooms, medical records repositories and medical laboratory companies, and aggregates it so that abnormal patterns of disease can be detected earlier than has previously been possible.

The CDC had spent about $184 million on the program through June 2008, the report stated, and program officials estimate the remaining costs at $314 million.

However, GAO said the estimates were not reliable. "Until program officials develop well-documented, comprehensive and accurate, and credible cost data, the CDC will not be able to reliably estimate the cost of fully implementing BioSense," the report stated.

To gauge the program's value, GAO interviewed numerous BioSense users in federal, state and local agencies and hospitals. Although the GAO' auditors said their sample was not scientific, they found few users who expressed strong enthusiasm for the program.

Among eight state and local users listed in a chart in the report, not one relied solely on BioSense to alert it to emerging public health threats. Users said the program did not provide enough useful data and was inflexible, according to GAO.

In a response to the report from the CDC's parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, officials did not dispute most of GAO's findings. Instead, they said they were committed to better program management and a detailed program plan would be completed in February.

The report was sent to members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees. A House budget report directed GAO to make the evaluation.