Creating a Public Health Affinity Domain for the Middle East

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 …