"The anthrax attacks of 2001 revealed serious deficiencies in the way hospitals and public health organizations are equipped to assess the nature and scale of a biological or chemical threat and communicate critical public health information," said Craig Feied, M.D., director of the Institute for Medical Informatics at Washington Hospital Center, and co-principal investigator of this grant. "We have to look beyond traditional communication methods and learn to deploy new real-time clinical data repositories, innovative Internet technologies, bioinformatics, and geographic information systems that will drastically improve secure information sharing, with the ultimate goal of better managing future health crises."

Seong K. Mun, Ph.D., professor of radiology and director of the Imaging Science and Information Systems (ISIS) Center at Georgetown University Medical Center is the principal investigator of this grant. Dr. Feied will lead the MedStar team along with co-site investigator Mark Smith, M.D., chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at MedStar Health's Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital.

This project, known as "Project Sentinel Collabortory" is built around the "InSight" real-time data repository currently in use at several MedStar hospitals. InSight contains one of the largest and fastest on-line clinical information databases in the world, and will serve as the data core for a new type of surveillance system linking several area hospitals with the District of Columbia Department of Health. The system will include de-identified medical information derived from inpatient and outpatient visits, together with external data related to weather, tra
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Contact: Elizabeth McDonald
eem6@georgetown.edu
202-687-5100
Georgetown University Medical Center
16-Oct-2003