SAN JOSE, CA – IBM, in collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative's Global Health and Security Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance, has created a technology that standardizes the method of sharing health information and automates the analysis of infectious disease outbreaks.

IBM officials say the secure, Web-based portal system, called the Public Health Information Affinity Domain, or PHIAD, will be deployed first in the Middle East.

The technology is intended to help contain diseases and minimize their impact, and the partners are pushing for eventual international deployment.

"This collaboration writes the newest chapter in a story of healthcare information technology innovation that tackles the lack of integration and communication between key players in the healthcare industry worldwide," said Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM's Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry. "Built upon the same, open-standards-based Health Information Exchange architecture that increasingly enables the use of electronic health records around the world, this new technology will improve critical health information sharing between nations in an increasingly global economy."

Pelino said PHIAD uses near-real time information to facilitate fast response and enables the secure exchange of data on both national and international levels with protection of privacy at all levels. The technology provides public health organizations with decision-making tools to implement a fast response to infectious disease outbreaks across geographic and political boundaries.

Disease reporting is required by law in most countries and under the International Health Regulations. The new IHR requires all countries to report any infectious disease outbreak of international significance. Currently, most reporting is done via fax, spreadsheet or phone calls. The biggest technical challenge to real-time notification is the lack of interoperability and use of standards and uniform coding systems.

IBM officials claim that, with PHIAD, company researchers have virtually eliminated the time-consuming, tedious tasks common in the public health community by creating an electronic platform that allows them to focus on critical tasks such as detecting emerging public health trends, pinpointing potential outbreaks and performing sophisticated analyses.