CHAPEL HILL -- A research team headed by UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State scientists wants to speed up sharing of the medical data routinely collected by doctors, veterinarians and other health providers across the state.
Doing so could even stop a terror attack, the researchers say.
That's the idea behind the North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative, or NCB-Prepared. Announced Monday, the federally funded project aims to link reams of data gathered across North Carolina and to quickly look for indicators of disease, food-borne illness or worse.
Speed is the key, said Mark Hoit, N.C. State's vice chancellor for information technology.
"We need the ability to see the data and find the anomalies in days or hours rather than weeks or months," said Hoit, one of the project's two lead investigators.
Although health data is plentiful, much of it isn't shared. The new project will use high-level computing to tap these databases, look for common symptoms and make quick predictions about coming threats to public health.
"All this information is out there in file cabinets," said Andrew Weniger, project manager with the Research Triangle Park-based North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance. "But different ones, and they're not even electronic in some cases. We're talking about moving a quantum leap. Finding a nugget in a big pile of data takes heavy machinery."
The project is funded by a one-year, $5 million congressional grant snared with the help of U.S. Rep. David Price of Chapel Hill, who chairs the House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee.
The project could detect a bioterror attack - such as a poisoned water or food supply - early enough to minimize casualties. It would also have more routine applications. Vets could use it to better estimate the start of tick season, and doctors could use it to predict heart attacks by looking at a broad array of common symptoms, said Charles Cairns, chairman of UNC's department of emergency medicine, who is leading the project with NCSU's Hoit.
