CONNECTING THE DOTS ACROSS HEALTH CARE DATA IN MULTIPLE ORGANIZATIONS WITHOUT CONSOLIDATING THE DATA

New techniques for net-centric information fusion have been deployed successfully in the intelligence community to improve outcomes and user productivity across scores of data collections and tens of billions of records and documents maintained within many different cooperating organizations. These techniques are also being deployed presently in the healthcare community to combine diverse sources of clinical data with information from genomic scans. This presentation will discuss the viability, functionality, and scalability of a virtual information sharing environment for holistic health. Capabilities can be provided to authorized users to span massive data collections maintained by cooperating public and private organizations and stored with many databases, document collections, and Web sites. Using a single intuitive browser-based user interface, a user can query, navigate, discover associations, analyze, and extract knowledge and associations across massive repositories without copying the data sets to a single centralized data center. Data are automatically normalized into efficient indexes which remain at the sites where the source data are created, maintained, updated, and protected. All access is over existing networks, and all processing is ‘at the edge’ where the source data are located. This capability delivers to a user non-degrading global relevancy ranking based on the user’s knowledge need, regardless of the number of locations or data volumes. Interactive functionality leverages and exploits structured and unstructured information sources and enables the user to sharpen and refine the user’s knowledge need during a short analysis and discovery session. Continuous monitoring functionality issues alerts to users as new information of relevance enters decentralized information sources. Batch analysis capabilities enable submission of data from a spreadsheet or database. The oral presentation will include a live demonstration of discovery of human health effects from environmental conditions, by simultaneously analyzing a variety of decentralized information sources about chemicals, toxins, medical publications, news, etc.