The CDC will overhaul BioSense in November, amid a wave of new data-sharing tactics rolling in from other fields that promises to bolster surveillance methods and architectures.

Krista Hanni doesn't consider herself an expert on the latest developments in IT-enabled syndromic and biosurveillance, but she does recognize that a groundswell of change is about to hit the discipline.

“We're at the beginning of a new field here,” said Hanni, the surveillance and preparedness manager for the Monterey County, Calif., Public Health Department. “That’s what we’re running into.”

The traditional epidemiological approach, which helps public health officials deal in an authoritative but delayed manner with outbreaks and disease caused by calamities, is being challenged by new forms of data and new approaches using methodologies from other fields.

Researchers and clinicians will see a huge boon in November, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s redesigned BioSense program is scheduled to go live with a new data-sharing approach in which local jurisdictions – not the CDC – maintain ownership of their data. Coincidentally or not, the new willingness to research and perhaps use new data types and methodologies will converge with meaningful use mandates set out in the HITECH funding.

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“BioSense will help the community ‘open for business,’” said Taha Kass-Hout, the CDC’s deputy director for information science and program manager for BioSense. “That is, any health department in the country could ask their providers to share healthcare information with them in a meaningful use-ready environment. That will remove a lot of the barriers from the providers as well as the health departments.”

What’s more, Hanni co-authored a recent report evaluating the CDC’s Early Aberration Reporting System’s (EARS) performance in detecting the H1N1 influenza that was published in Statistics, Politics, and Policy in tandem with researchers from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. That partnership that may serve as a microcosm for a new model of collecting and sharing syndromic surveillance data in which local and regional health departments share much more power with the federal government.

BioSense and that new model could, in turn, open many new sources of data to improve surveillance methods and architectures.

First data already out

The CDC is offering the financial resources to make this new model available as well. In the 2010 fiscal year, only $3 million of the BioSense program’s $27 million overall budget was dedicated to state and local health departments. Evidence of that is changing: Local jurisdictions received $7.5 million of a $26 million 2011 budget; the proposed 2012 budget calls for $10 million to go to state and local health departments out of $25 million overall.

Indeed, the first local BioSense data under the new concept has already been posted by the Tarrant County, Texas, Public Health Department. The data, hosted on the Google Public Data Explorer platform, includes aggregated figures of emergency room illnesses, including gastro-intestinal illness, rashes, heat-related illness and upper respiratory issues in a six-county area of northeastern Texas.

The data can be accessed by anybody – other health departments, first responders, clinicians, even the general public.