The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced $3.7 million in new grants designed to enhance healthcare information in an effort to improve the detection and response to emerging public health threats. The new grants will fund studies at three new Centers of Excellence in Public Health Informatics located at New York City Department of Health and Hygiene; the University of Utah, Salt Lake City; and Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland.
?The goal of this funding will be identifying new tools and methods to enhance health information sharing and ultimately lead to the adoption of a nationwide, technology-based, integrated healthcare surveillance system. We hope we?ll be able to detect emerging public health threats earlier and more efficiently,? said Dr. Steve Solomon, director of the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service at CDC.
These Centers of Excellence will be designing new tools and methods to assist and enhance CDC?s BioSense program. BioSense provides real-time biosurveillance for potential health threats through immediate access to data from hospitals and healthcare systems in major metropolitan cities across the nation.