Distinguished Speaker Series: James Kaufman
Creating a Public Health Affinity Domain for the Middle Eastern Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance
James Kaufman Ph.D.
IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA
Abstract:
Infectious and food borne diseases pose a growing international threat. In this talk we will describe how this concern has led to creation of communities that use information technology to protect public health across border and will discuss how the Middle Eastern Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS) can be a model for other regional efforts. The goals of MECIDS are to improve the ability of nations in the Middle East to respond to disease outbreaks and to build trust. Today, the MECIDS participants include the Jordanian, Israeli, and Palestinian Ministries of Health along with several regional University schools of Public Health. It has advisers from the World Health Organization and European and American organizations. IBM Research has been working with the MECIDS team to create a new information technology infrastructure for their public health community. This infrastructure is built on emerging healthcare I/T standards as well as new open source tools including the Eclipse Open Healthcare Framework and the Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM). Like clinical care, public health requires its own affinity domain, including groups of organizations that work together and use a common set of policies and centralized services in pursuit of a shared mission. As in clinical care, this affinity domain will benefit from open industry standards for interoperability, data exchange, and common coding systems. While creating interoperable systems is technically demanding, it is do-able. It requires political will and close collaboration among all those involved across enterprises and geographies. The typical public health ecosystem is composed of several layers (i.e., regional, national, international) suggesting a layered architectural approach with different privacy requirements at each layer. These principles will be discussed along with the solution now being deployed for the Middle East Consortium for Infectious Disease Surveillance.
The MECIDS project is funded by the Global Health and Security Initiative (a part of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, NTI.org). Creation of the Public Health Affinity Domain was supported by IBM Research and the IBM Foundation.
Bio:
James H. Kaufman is manager of the Healthcare Research project in the Department of Computer Science at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and his PhD in Physics from U.C.S.B. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. During his career at IBM Research Dr. Kaufman has made contributions to several fields ranging from simulation science to magnetic device technology. His scientific contributions include work on pattern formation, conducting polymers, diamond like carbon, superconductivity, experimental studies of the Moon Illusion, and contributions to distributed computing, privacy protection, and grid middleware. His current research interests include Public Health, Interoperable Health Information Infrastructure, Electronic Health Records, and Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeling. His group is currently working with the Eclipse Open Health Framework http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/ to make technology for interoperability in healthcare and public health available as open source.
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