This announcement is further proof that we need to leverage and integrate existing and planned applications and decision support tools to provide early detection and management of incidents involving biological and chemical threat agents.  Pangaea has existing systems (GUARDIAN and JICS) that address these needs and could serve as integral surveillance and management tools to ensure that we are able to quickly detect potential incidents and support intelligent management decisions which will help to minimize the impact and more importantly, save lives.

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Pangaea would like to thank and congratulate two of our own for their dedicated service.  Chris Kowal has just completed his 12th year at Pangaea (and is hitting the ground running for year 13), and this week marks the 10th anniversary of Shon Doseck joining the Pangaea team.  Thanks to Chris and Shon for all of their hard work over the years and I look forward to new milestones in the future.

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We at Pangaea would like to wish everyone a joyous, healthy and prosperous New Year. We are thankful to all of our clients and business partners for making 2009 a successful year despite the trying economic conditions.  As we enter 2010 we are fortunate to be in a position to enjoy continued growth.  We constantly hear politicians on both sides of the aisle discuss how small business is the backbone of this country and the key to full economic recovery in spite of the fact that none of them ever do anything to promote small business.  This country is beholden to multi-national, bottom line driven corporations and powerful special interest groups.  In spite of this, small business continues to thrive and succeed, battling government red tape and large corporate entities whose rigid, out-dated management  techniques are designed to prevent the innovation and agility required to navigate in these difficult and changing times.

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The annual Pangaea Holiday Dinner wiil be held Friday December 18 at Trattoria Trullo in Lincoln Square.  We look forward to seeing everyone and celebrating another successful year.

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This is an interesting project developed by the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS).   This application is a step in the right direction to provide national disease surveillance although it only focuses on ILI.  The following description is from the Distribute website:

Distribute, a project of the International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS), is a distributed, influenza surveillance system that uses summarized, influenza like illness (ILI) syndrome data from existing visit level syndromic surveillance systems developed by public health agencies. It is dedicated to real-time data evaluation, allowing for more rapid surveillance and improved decision making. This project utilizes anonymous visit count data submitted from a variety of public health departments and organizations, in conjunction with Google charts and visualizations and a web services tool kit developed at the University of Washington named Shoki, to generate a real-time display of summarized daily data.

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Ms. Araya recently joined Pangaea as an application developer.  Ms. Araya has over 3 years of experience in developing software applications using web 2.0 technologies as well as the design and development of relational databases for large and complex datasets.  Prior to joining Pangaea, Ms. Araya worked a software engineer for an IT consulting firm where she developed an online travel application as well as an inventory management system.  Prior to that, Ms Araya worked as an application developer for the Ministry of Finance in Asmara, Eritrea where she developed the Ministry’s Personnel System to manage employee records.  Ms Araya holds a B.S. in Computer Science from University of Asmara, Asmara, Eritrea and an M.S. in Computer Science from Maharishi University of Management, Fairfield, IA.  We are pleased to have Helen as part of the Pangaea team.

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The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has a number of initiatives to attempt to track Influenza Like Illness (ILI) and in particular outbreaks of H1N1. On Sept. 1, CDC began securely exchanging public health data daily via the Nationwide Health Information Network (NHIN). The pilot project is gathering flu symptom data from health care providers in Indiana, New York and Washington state.The full article can be found at:

http://fcw.com/Articles/2009/10/26/CDC-expands-flu-tracking-efforts.aspx

Pangaea Information Technologies, Ltd. has been working on a project in collaboration with Rush University Medical Center called GUARDIAN (Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Notification) which provides an AI based approach to detecting diseases including ILI and H1N1.  GUARDIAN is currently generating daily and weekly reports on likely and confirmed H1N1 cases.

GUARDIAN uses a variety of techniques — from simple code look-up-tables to advanced natural-language processing algorithms — to transform and standardize these disparate data sources into a relational, hierarchical data structure that is optimized for infectious disease modeling. Additionally, GUARDIAN has a flexible and modular architecture in addition to a real-time web-based user interface.  This allows GUARDIAN to be used for monitoring of any set of infectious diseases in real-time (in addition to the daily and weekly summary reports that it generates).

• Tags:
  • CDC
  • GUARDIAN
  • biosurveillance
  • H1N1
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On October 28th, GE Healthcare announced that they had received a grant from the CDC to perform “near real-time” monitoring of the spread of the H1N1 influenza virus.  This project pulls daily reports from patient data already being collected in GE’s Centricity EMR system to send to the CDC.  The advantage of this system is that GE is able to leverage the medical data that they are already collecting on an estimated 14 million patients.  The obvious disadvantage is that their system is specifically limited to data from hospitals and clinics that are already using GE’s system for their EMR.

For the past few years, Pangaea Information Technologies has been working on a project in collaboration with Rush University Medical Center called GUARDIAN (Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Notification) which takes a different approach to solving this problem.  Like GE’s system, GUARDIAN is currently generating daily reports on likely and confirmed H1N1 cases.  However, the GUARDIAN system is not tied to a particular EMR.  During its development, GUARDIAN has interfaced with EMRs from EPIC, Picis and Cerner using the industry-standard HL7 messaging protocol.

GUARDIAN uses a variety of techniques — from simple code lookup-tables to advanced natural-language processing algorithms — to transform and standardize these disparate data sources into a relational, hierarchical data structure that is optimized for infectious disease modeling. Additionally, GUARDIAN has a flexible and modular architecture in addition to a real-time web-based user interface.  This allows GUARDIAN to be used for monitoring of any set of infectious diseases in real-time (in addition to the daily and weekly summary reports that it generates).

GE’s contribution to the CDC’s H1N1 surveillance is a major improvement over the analysis of 2-week-old data that they were previously limited to.  However, we at Pangaea believe that the ability to interface with any medical record system and the flexibility to quickly add/update disease-modeling profiles will make the GUARDIAN system a more powerful and useful biosurveillance system for the next major outbreak.

• Tags:
  • GUARDIAN
  • EMR
  • H1N1
  • CDC
  • biosurveillance
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The Parsons and Pangaea team were awarded a contract to develop the next version of the Range Complex Master Planning Tool (RCMP-T) for the U.S. Army under the Parsons U.S. Army Sustainable Range Program (SRP) contract. The RCMP-T is a web based application that serves the SRP community by providing installations a capability of developing, staffing, and publishing a comprehensive Range Complex Master Plan (RCMP) for their respective installations and/or areas of responsibility. An RCMP is a requirement of AR 350-19, The Sustainable Range Program. The RCMP is a detailed master plan for an installation and/or area of responsibility covering current and projected live fire and non-live ranges, special training facilities, training areas, and the infrastructure required to support SRP’s planning efforts.

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Pangaea was awarded a contract under a grant with Rush University Medical Center from the U.S. Army Medical Research and ACQ Activity, Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center to continue the development for GUARDIAN (Geographic Utilization of Artificial Intelligence in Real-Time for Disease Identification and Notification). GUARDIAN is a real-time, scalable, extensible, automated, knowledge-based biological threat agent (BTA) detection and diagnosis system. The purpose of GUARDIAN is to conduct rapid analysis of multiple parameters contained in medical records collected by hospital emergency departments in real time in order to detect probable specific disease occurrence. The goal of this system is to assist clinicians in detecting potential BTAs as quickly and effectively as possible based on pre-diagnostic data in order to better respond to and mitigate the potential effects of a large-scale outbreak.

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