Bioterrorism surveillance with real-time data warehousing

This paper discusses several technical challenges in the development of an effective bioterrorism surveillance system. Three factors are critical: 1. It must be multidimensional. 2. It must accelerate the transmission of findings and data to most closely approximate real time surveillance so as to provide sufficient warning. 3. It must have the capability for pattern recognition that will quickly identify an alarm or alert threshold value. We build on our on-going health care data warehousing research to provide solutions to these challenges. The innovative use of flash data warehousing provides the essential ability to compare. real-time healthcare data with historical patterns of key surveillance indicators. A comprehensive architecture of a bioterrorism surveillance system is presented. A demonstration project in Florida showcases these ideas.