This announcement is further proof that we need to leverage and integrate existing and planned applications and decision support tools to provide early detection and management of incidents involving biological and chemical threat agents. Pangaea has existing systems (GUARDIAN and JICS) that address these needs and could serve as integral surveillance and management tools to ensure that we are able to quickly detect potential incidents and support intelligent management decisions which will help to minimize the impact and more importantly, save lives.
Happy New Year
We at Pangaea would like to wish everyone a joyous, healthy and prosperous New Year. We are thankful to all of our clients and business partners for making 2009 a successful year despite the trying economic conditions. As we enter 2010 we are fortunate to be in a position to enjoy continued growth. We constantly hear politicians on both sides of the aisle discuss how small business is the backbone of this country and the key to full economic recovery in spite of the fact that none of them ever do anything to promote small business. This country is beholden to multi-national, bottom line driven corporations and powerful special interest groups. In spite of this, small business continues to thrive and succeed, battling government red tape and large corporate entities whose rigid, out-dated management techniques are designed to prevent the innovation and agility required to navigate in these difficult and changing times.
Distribute ILI Surveillance
This is an interesting project developed by the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS). This application is a step in the right direction to provide national disease surveillance although it only focuses on ILI. The following description is from the Distribute website:
Distribute, a project of the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS), is a distributed, influenza surveillance system that uses summarized, influenza like illness (ILI) syndrome data from existing visit level syndromic surveillance systems developed by public health agencies. It is dedicated to real-time data evaluation, allowing for more rapid surveillance and improved decision making. This project utilizes anonymous visit count data submitted from a variety of public health departments and organizations, in conjunction with Google charts and visualizations and a web services tool kit developed at the University of Washington named Shoki, to generate a real-time display of summarized daily data.
Pangaea welcomes Helen Araya
Ms. Araya recently joined Pangaea as an application developer. Ms. Araya has over 3 years of experience in developing software applications using web 2.0 technologies as well as the design and development of relational databases for large and complex datasets. Prior to joining Pangaea, Ms. Araya worked a software engineer for an IT consulting firm where she developed an online travel application as well as an inventory management system. Prior to that, Ms Araya worked as an application developer for the Ministry of Finance in Asmara, Eritrea where she developed the Ministry’s Personnel System to manage employee records. Ms Araya holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Asmara, Asmara, Eritrea and an M.S. in Computer Science from Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, IA. We are pleased to have Helen as part of the Pangaea team.
CDC expands flu-tracking efforts
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a number of initiatives to attempt to track Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and in particular outbreaks of H1N1. On Sept. 1, CDC began securely exchanging public health data daily via the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The pilot project is gathering flu symptom data from health care providers in Indiana, New York and Washington state.The full article can be found at:
http://fcw.com/Articles/2009/10/26/CDC-expands-flu-tracking-efforts.aspx
Pangaea Information Technologies, Ltd. has been working on a project in collaboration with Rush University Medical Center called GUARDIAN (Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Notification) which provides an AI based approach to detecting diseases including ILI and H1N1. GUARDIAN is currently generating daily and weekly reports on likely and confirmed H1N1 cases.
GUARDIAN uses a variety of techniques — from simple code look-up-tables to advanced natural-language processing algorithms — to transform and standardize these disparate data sources into a relational, hierarchical data structure that is optimized for infectious disease modeling. Additionally, GUARDIAN has a flexible and modular architecture in addition to a real-time web-based user interface. This allows GUARDIAN to be used for monitoring of any set of infectious diseases in real-time (in addition to the daily and weekly summary reports that it generates).