Robert Coyne
Executive Partner and COO
TopQuadrant, Inc.
Parsa Mirhaji
MD, Center Director, Assistant Professor of Medicine
The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston
Wednesday 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Level: Data Management - Intermediate
Public Health surveillance is the ongoing collection and analysis of data to identify and respond to community health problems in a timely manner. Important public health information is distributed across disparate domains and data bases including from information sources such as emergency room visits, water contamination and air quality. Meaningful integration has been the major barrier to the integrated use of such information and correlative data from other sources within public health information systems.
Next generation public health information systems will no longer be isolated and specialized to address particular needs within the boundaries of a organization, department or user group. Rather, they will be part of a larger, complex and dynamically changing collaborative environment. Healthcare providers such as hospitals, pharmacies, clinical laboratories, and departments of health, will need to seamlessly interoperate and integrate with systems across many other types of organizations.
The talk will first quickly summarize how the use of semantic web technology has enabled Dr. Parsa Mirhaji and his team at the University of Texas Health Science Center (UTHSC) to integrate and utilize for bio-surveillance purposes any relevant data set regardless of source, structure and format. It will present as background the reference architecture, capability model and ongoing implementation through stages of a system that makes extensive use of semantic technology and ontologies as on-line, extensible knowledge models to drive a real time system of disease breakout and threat assessment. The main thrust of the talk will then elaborate on the architectural and engineering challenges that are encountered and must be addressed to overcome the bottlenecks and hurdles of applying Semantic Web technology to solve real world, large scale and complex problems. As a case study, it will tell the story of the continuing, fruitful academic and industrial collaboration between UTHSC and TopQuadrant to identify the characteristics of a scalable and robust Semantic Web application platform.
Parsa Mirhaji, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Health Information Sciences at the School of Health Information Sciences. Dr. Mirhaji is Director of The Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Informatics Research, where he has developed predictive epidemiology models and detection methodologies for emerging infectious diseases such as avian flu and a reference architecture for situational awareness for public health preparedness (SARA). Dr. Mirhaji has been an acting committee member on the Texas Hospital Preparedness Program at the Texas Department of Health and Human Services and the Texas Institute for Health Policy Research, a selected member of Technology Subcommittee – Health Information Technology Advisory Commission, Texas Department of Health and Human Services, chair of the International Defense and Homeland Security Conference 2003-2006, and chair of the International Conference on Rule Markup Languages for the Semantic Web, 2006.