Briefs

Federal agencies increasingly use data mining to extract valuable info buried in large databases

FCW.com, BY Aliya Sternstein, June 19, 2006

At this moment, public health officials are poring over terabytes of health care data to detect the first signs of a possible pandemic flu outbreak, bioterrorism attack or other contagion. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began a biosurveillance program in 2003, but advances in information exchange standards and concerns about pandemic flu have accelerated its national implementation.

The federal initiative, called BioSense, analyzes existing health care records, such as diagnoses, laboratory test results, physician visits and hospitalizations. The results help public health officials discover where an event is occurring and decide when to intervene with vaccines or quarantines. The CDC works with regional hospital systems to create secure connections between their health care databases and the federal database. The data does not contain patient names, medical numbers or personal identifiers, CDC officials said.

GAO defines data mining as the application of database technology and techniques to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data and infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results. Koontz said she doesn�t understand why data mining has a negative connotation. �Analysis is not evil,� she said.

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