Abstract
Automated bioterrorism surveillance systems based on routinely collected electronic ambulatory care and related health care records offer cost-efficient opportunities for timely detection of potential or other events of public health importance. We describe a system which has been providing daily surveillance data for Boston since October 2001 and a much larger, national demonstration surveillance project which is currently being developed. These projects rely entirely on commonly used and evolving open standards and an infrastructure built almost entirely using the products of vigorous open source projects. Readily available, scalable and reliable open source tools are used for encryption, authentication, data exchange, general programming and web-based information dissemination. While an expanding range of high quality open source projects can provide many of the infrastructure components needed for these activities, making open source choices is not always easy given existing local organisational practice, skill sets and infrastructure. We discuss some of the issues behind the choices made for these projects. |
