Supporting BioSense

InductiveHealth is proud to have been selected, along with team members ICF International and Deloitte Consulting, to support, operate, and enhance the BioSense system for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Center for Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Laboratory Services (CSELS). In support of this effort, InductiveHealth will provide surveillance expertise, information management and technology services, and data management and analytics support for multiple aspects of BioSense, CDC’s cloud-based public health surveillance system.

“BioSense is an exciting program that supports the collection of some of the largest quantities of electronic healthcare data reported to public health.  We look forward to working with CDC to enhance and support BioSense to increase the ability of local, state, and national health officials to monitor and respond to conditions that affect the public’s health.” – Matthew Dollacker, Managing Director, InductiveHealth Informatics

 

 

InductiveHealth on Big Data

InductiveHealth’s Managing Director, Matthew Dollacker, was recently covered in a piece by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s New Public Health Blog.  The article focused on key topics from Matthew’s recent APHA talk on big data in the public health arena.

Though highly-structured, coded data will continue to be a mainstay in public health and healthcare, there is an ongoing revolution taking place in the use of extremely large, semi-structured and unstructured data sets to gather new insights through advanced machine learning techniques.

InductiveHealth is at the forefront of this revolution, which promises to transform the information tools available to public health institutions.

From the article:

“Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009,” said Dollacker. “And those who are positioned to take advantage of this data explosion are those that are aware of it, can access it, and can handle it.” …

 

Dollacker highlighted a couple of recent examples that show the potential big data has for public health. One instance was the Google Flu project – merely based on what users were searching on google.com, the search engine was able to take that data and help predict flu outbreaks at a regional and city level – ahead of official sources.

 

“What this highlights,” said Dollacker, “is the tremendous value that is sitting out there in data right now. Who would have thought we could have address this issue by looking at nothing more than existing search terms?”