A pilot project of  the Collaborative Software Initiative (CSI) of Portland, Ore., may help bolster infection protection and control. The two-year, $2 million project is enabling the state of Utah meet requirements of the national Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention for tracking regional epidemics electronically.

A number of questions were posed by Infection Protection to CSI. What follows is a summary of those interviews.
Infection Protection: We hear this project is being built collaboratively. What does that mean?

Mike Herrick, project manager of CSI: Significantly and simply put, health professionals access the system, using their desk and connecting to a server on the Internet. The Internet server has the program that makes the system work, and collects the data from disparate sources. It works on a variety of server platforms, and the program development itself is similar to Firefox collaborative development. Subject matter experts  — i.e., doctors, nurses, epidemiologists — who know the field inside and out, and world class developers, this makes them one team, the core team.  Other subject matter experts suggest features and test the system, but the core team is responsible for delivering the product together.

No dedicated desktop is required. The core system is browser-based. Anyone can access the system. This includes state and local health people, labs, hospitals, universities, etc. It may also make sense for hospitals to have a simple configuration of the system running within the hospital for their own infectious disease tracking. The hospital instance could then interoperate with the state and local instance in sharing information on the case.
Infection Protection: What is the status of the project as of this writing?

Dr. Robert Rolfs, chairman of the Core Team that guides the development of the project, and state epidemiologist responsible for epidemiology in the Utah Department of Public Health: This first stage is a collaborative effort to provide a product for the State of Utah and the 12 Local Health Departments in Utah.

Infection Protection: How may this program help infection prevention?

Dr. Rolfs: Public Health activities to prevent infections are based on epidemiology and the information provided by epidemiology. More timely identification of cases of infection where public health intervention can limit further spread, such as cases of measles, pertussis, rubella, sexually transmitted diseases, TV, etc. More timely identification of outbreaks where public health action can limit further infection, such as last summer’s outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Utah, or an outbreak related to a food product.

– by Peter Menkin, San Francisco Correspondent

Epidemiologists use technology to track diseases.