Public health data system wins NIH grant support
By DON LONG
Healthcare InfoTech Managing Editor
You can find IT for pharmaceutical discovery, IT for regulatory management, IT for hospitals and patient medical records, IT for this, that and just about anything you want in healthcare.
But little for public health.
"The needs in this area are just incredible," says Richard Thomas, PhD, vice president and founder of Medical Services Research Group (MSRG; Memphis). "It’s like describing what existed in banking in the 1970s. Until just two or three years ago, there was no appreciation for the need for this sort of thing nationally."
Thus Thomas says that while healthcare often lags behind industry and even government in IT awareness, public health is even slower to identify and act on this need. He and MSRG are determined to change that.
MSRG recently was awarded a two-year Phase II Small Business Innovative Research Grant of $750,000 to develop a public health data management system. That system will attempt to take all the disparate information concerning healthcare plus whatever is healthcare-related pull it together into one data bank, and then manipulate it to understand what is going on in the public health sector and to guide decision-making and policy-making.
Thomas predicts that the Public Health Data Manage ment System (PH/DMS) MSRG is creating will go far be yond the traditional approaches to managing data traditionally practiced in public health.
"Public health has limped along for decades with minimal access to relevant information without software designed specifically for public health research, monitoring and reporting." He adds that "the technological capabilities are now available to facilitate such a project, and at much less cost than at any time in the past."
Some of its uses, he says, will be to determine a community’s health status, develop community health "report cards," monitor health trends, track disease trends, and identify links between public health and the other factors impacting public health. The result Thomas hopes for is to help public health officials develop better strategies for meeting public health needs.
Because the PH/DMS will be used by so many different groups and agencies, he says the system will have to be some sort of hybrid, combining a general data warehousing template but customizable to the various user systems. The core of the system is emphasis on SAS technology from the SAS Institute (Cary, NC), providing end-to-end data warehousing, and the rapid manipulation of the various data sources which then produce results through an intuitive graphical interface.
"This is not earth-shaking," Thomas says. "We’re just creating a way of accessing data which hasn’t been brought together before but is being demanded by all kinds of groups, from local, state and federal agencies to consumer groups. There is a growing and tremendous interest in this kind of data and how it can be used in public health."
Formed in 1988, MSRG is a private company that has primarily focused on information consulting and has developed selected software products for data management. Thomas received his education at Vanderbilt University as a medical sociologist, and he says he began realizing, about two years ago, that what the company was doing could help to fill the huge IT cap in the public health sector.
MSRG is developing the prototype system, which it hopes to have completed and deployed at several sites during the first year of the grant, with the second year then dedicated to refining the system, adding more capabilities to it and deploying it at many more sites.
Six beta sites already have been selected, and Thomas says the company is open to proposals from any interested agencies for additional deployment of the PH/DMS system. While much of the ongoing work of testing and development will be supported through additional grant funding, those groups serving as beta sites will be expected to offer "some level of financial commitment to the project," Thomas says.
Besides this project, Thomas predicts that MSRG will launch a second product with a public health orientation sometime in the next 90 days.
Overall, he describes the company’s new strategy as an attempt to put public health information "in action." But because this area has lagged so far behind other healthcare IT sectors, the effort isn’t to take public health into the 21st century, he says. "We’re just trying to bring it into the 20th century."
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