Approximately 100 leaders from the healthcare, government and pharmaceutical industries gathered at the Fuqua School of Business Saturday for a speech by Lynn Steele, director of the Division of Emergency Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
During the speech-part of a conference organized by Fuqua's Health Care Club-Steele addressed how technology can be used to understand, monitor and predict the spread of disease.
Steele, who joined the CDC in 1988, discussed the CDC's BioSense program, which aims to link the nation's hospitals, public health systems and health laboratories in order to enable the CDC and health-care organizations to collect and analyze data.
Once fully implemented, BioSense will be able to detect bioterrorist attacks or epidemics in their early stages and to provide health-care personnel with real-time health data from their local communities, Steele said.
"The realities of terrorism revealed the need to rapidly assess disease trends in real time," she said.
Accessing health care data is currently difficult due to the wide variety of information systems used by the nation's hospitals and public health institutions, she said. She added that by collecting data in a single national system, patient care would be improved and lives would be saved.
"People died after [Hurricane] Katrina because there was no way to know what kind of therapies they were on," Steele said. The BioSense program, she added, is able to construct patient health profiles that present an individual's complete medical history on one secure web page.
The program has raised concerns among some privacy advocates, however, who worry that the collection of individual health data by the federal government is inappropriate and creates the potential for abuse. To address these fears, Steele said the CDC intends to tie the data to randomized numbers rather than to personally identifying information.
"[The CDC] is not interested in individual names, but we are interested in people that keep coming back to the same hospital," Steele said. "Only specific users authenticated with a digital certificate would have access."
The BioSense program is currently collecting health-care data from 500 hospitals, including all of the nation's public health institutions, Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense hospitals.
In addition, six states, including North Carolina, have passed legislation requiring hospitals and other health care institutions to share patient data.
Although the BioSense program is still in its early stages, Steele hopes to have 3,500 hospitals across the nation linked into BioSense's real-time datasharing system by 2009.
"The most important thing BioSense has done is develop the standard for what information needs to be exchanged between hospitals and laboratories," she said.
Leaders from the pharmaceutical industry present at the talk were generally supportive of the BioSense program.
"The intent to have an unimpeded flow of information across traditional boundaries is crucial to the long-range public health of the country," said Dick Hinson, vice president for commercial operations for Roche Laboratories.
Rich Pilnik, chief marketing officer for Eli Lilly and Company, said it would probably take a disaster before people realized the importance of a program like BioSense.
"[Steele] gave us a perspective that few people know and understand," he said.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.