Biosense 2.0: New Model for Improving Quality, Decreasing Costs, and Increasing Collaboration in Surveillance

Brief Summary

The BioSense 2.0 platform, sponsored by the CDC and administered by ASTHO, has the potential to greatly facilitate capture of meaninful use data, sharing of surveillance tools between public health departments, and collaborative development of new tools.  It may also greatly decrease the cost to health apartments of creating and maintaining surveillance systems.

BioSense is a cloud-based computing environment for syndromic surveillance that contains information on emergency department visits and hospitalizations hospitals in participating state and local jurisdictions, as well as Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense hospitals.  It has private, secure storage areas for each participating public health agency, shared software applications, and functions agencies may use to share data with each other. It is designed to mimic HDs' current syndromic surveillance operations on a shared platform, creating new opportunities for sharing tools and appropriately de-identified data to create a more integrated, national surveillance system. It is also a "catcher’s mitt" through which public health departments can receive syndromic surveillance data from health care providers with "meaningful use" certified EHRs. The shared, cloud-based environment minimizes the system costs for each participant; the system and support costs are paid through CDC funding at a price far lower than for most CDC surveillance systems.

While the system is funded by the CDC, a third party (ASTHO ) holds the contract for the environment, and the environment is governed by representatives of local, state, and federal agencies.  ASTHO acts as an agent for the participating jurisdictions, preserving each jurisdiction’s direct authority over its data. This structure makes each participant a partner on the platform, rather than the CDC being the controlling authority.

If the BioSense 2.0 model is successful, it may be applied to other common public health operations, decreasing costs  and increasing quality by prompting greater collaboration among public health departments. It already has wide participation; seven LHDs and 28 SHDs have signed BioSense data use agreements (DUAs), and DUAs were being negotiated with three other LHDs and 15 SHD (as of mid-November 2012, per http://Biosense2.org). The roundtable session will begin with a brief description of the BioSense 2.0 platform and its governance, followed by a discussion of

• how BioSense is being used by state and local health departments,
• the pros and cons of this general model of a shared, cloud-based platform for public health informatics, and
• why states are or are not using the platform.