An integrated approach for enhancing foodborne outbreak surveillance

Title: “An Integrated approach for enhancing foodborne outbreak surveillance” Background: Foodborne diseases affect millions of Americans, causing illness and even death. Public Health continually requires advancing technologies in surveillance and--as related to food safety--we seek for greater timeliness and accuracy in detection and response to threats to human health through protection of the food supply chain. Objective/Purpose: Design & initiate development of a health information system to enable timely/real-time detection and analysis of foodborne disease outbreak information. The approach realizes the importance of surveillance, early detection and tracking of disease outbreak patterns at the production and food product levels coupled with clinical/laboratory sources of surveillance to continuously monitor emerging threats of contamination/outbreaks. Methods: Northrop Grumman has been developing disease surveillance solutions, including multiple foodborne disease outbreak related systems. Within the context of food safety, we need to ensure all stages within the farm-to-plate progression are considered and monitored appropriately. Our approach provides multi-domain data collection, pattern recognition & analytics for rapid detection and tracking of early disease patterns during food production/inspection and through clinical/laboratory reporting of disease. We utilize our extensive knowledge in that domain to ensure delivery of the required information and tools to manage/visualize data for monitoring and reporting functions. Results: The integrated view of food safety information, coupled with a set of tools that provide PH surveillance capabilities, along with the use of cloud technologies for flexible multi-domain data management, big data analytics, and geospatial/modeling visualization, supports more efficient outbreak monitoring, detection, and investigation approach that results in a more complete situational awareness during the event. Discussion/Conclusions: The Food Safety Comprehensive Surveillance System provides the ability to view, analyze and report data from disparate sources in a flexible environment of tools and services, empowering the monitoring and investigative teams/analysts as well as decision makers.