posted March 09, 2006 01:53 PM            

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Feb. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Informatica Corporation , a leading provider of data integration software, today announced that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has successfully implemented the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform to help detect and respond quickly to public health and biological events across the nation. Utilized in the congressionally mandated real-time BioSense project, PowerCenter is a key enabler of the nation's ability to integrate data from emergency departments, clinics, pharmacies and other facilities across the nation. PowerCenter helps the CDC identify outbreaks early in their lifecycle, track their progress minute-to-minute, and measure the on-going effectiveness of interventions.

"Informatica's PowerCenter is the data integration, migration and synchronization standard for the CDC's National Center for Public Health Informatics, helping us perform services vital to the nation's health and security," said Barry Rhodes, associate director for technology and informatics in the National Center for Public Health Informatics' Division of Emergency Preparedness and Response of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "With PowerCenter, we've achieved the ability to capture, move and analyze vast amounts of health event data in real-time in order to effectively manage information regarding fast-developing emergency situations. Faced with an ever-expanding number of data sources, types, formats and target databases, PowerCenter provides us with a transparent, scalable, high-availability infrastructure for maximum efficiency and timeliness."

PowerCenter is a cornerstone of the BioSense project for early detection of disease outbreaks and biological attacks, and for continuous real-time visibility into public health emergencies. Integrating real-time data from emergency departments, clinics, pharmacies and other facilities across the nation, PowerCenter's ability to integrate semi-structured data sets such as HL-7, reusable data transforms and distributed development capabilities were instrumental in enabling the CDC to start collecting real-time data from major hospital systems in ten metropolitan areas by the end of 2005, as mandated by Congress. A further 30 to 40 hospital systems in another 20 cities will be added to the program in 2006.

PowerCenter also plays a pivotal role in the CDC's Preparedness Data Warehouse program, where it transforms and integrates historical event data, as well as data related to hundreds of thousands of laboratory specimens and tests across numerous sources, into a centralized repository. The transformed data can then be analyzed in-depth by the epidemiological community.

"The CDC's use of Informatica PowerCenter illustrates how data integration projects are becoming increasingly complex across multiple dimensions -- more diverse data sources, more data types and industry-specific formats, more requirements for real-time, and more mission-critical in nature," said Karen Steele, vice president of corporate marketing at Informatica. "These challenges are significant in healthcare and government, but are present in all other major industry segments as well. We're pleased that the CDC has placed Informatica at the center of its infrastructure for optimizing the nation's responses to health emergencies."

About Informatica

Informatica Corporation is a leading provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, companies can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 2,400 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of any complexity and scale. For more information, call 650-385-5000 (1-800-970-1179 in the U.S.), or visit http://www.informatica.com/.

NOTE: Informatica and PowerCenter are trademarks of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.

Informatica Corporation

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Sometimes great things develop from tragedy. This system was developed due to the potential for an attack on the US (or other countries) with Chemical, Radiological or Biological weapons.

posted March 09, 2006 02:11 PM            

I worked on this system when I was in Bioterrorism and it also used with day to day tracking of infectious diseases. It's beautiful in that we can now track outbreaks (even simple ones such as salmonella food poisonings) from city to city and as widespread as state to state.

It's funny though, I had a co-worker that was extremely arrogant and would speak as though she was always addressing an audience with a medical background. She couldn't break things down in laymen terms which killed her ability to speak in public to our population. She would get on me for speaking to my colleagues in plain English and when I once used the word "dude" LMAO....