The North Carolina Bio-Preparedness Collaborative, a partnership between the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; North Carolina State University (NCSU) and software analytics company SAS, will analyze data from various organizations in an attempt to better understand past medical emergency patterns, which will in turn help predict and control future outbreaks.
For example, the Emergency Medical Services Corp. receives 1.5 million ambulance calls every year and holds records of those calls from many years past, said David Potenziani, the collaborative’s executive director. “But they don’t necessarily understand patterns,” he said, “and they certainly don’t understand how they can detect anomalies, which we believe are the pathway to being able to detect emergencies and potential threats to human health.”
The idea for the system sprouted in 2007 when a group of University of North Carolina faculty was talking about coughing, Potenziani said. Questions started to form about how to detect threats like avian flu that originate in the natural world and in nonhuman species. These disease vectors are hard to detect and therefore can spread to thousands of humans without warning.
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