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What is Public Health Information Affinity Domain (PHIAD)?

PHIAD creates the first on-demand system in the public health industry by enabling the integration and sharing of data generated at clinical and public health institutions across proprietary systems and political boundaries.

The system is built upon international coding systems, as well as the coordination between open-source technologies and the "Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise" (IHE) initiative in the use of standards to allow multi-national public health reporting and surveillance.

PHIAD supports hierarchical data flow across different domains. Each regional PHIAD collects data from local sources, such as doctors and veterinarians. The regional PHIAD then forwards appropriate information to a national PHIAD, which is administered by a disease control organization such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). PHIAD can extend this hierarchy of data sharing to international partnerships. At each level, different data-sharing policies concerning person identification, location identification, authorship, and results can be implemented.

High level overview of PHIAD architecture

The ability to share public health data electronically paves the way for sophisticated and advanced analysis tools that visualize the population health, detect outbreaks, determine the effectiveness of policy, and perform forecast modeling.

How does it work?

PHIAD requires no user installation. Because PHIAD is a Web-based application, end users can access the system from their Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser.

The Web application presents a simple report entry, submission, and query interface, all of which allow a participating location to create and view data from the shared infrastructure.

By using the submission form or by importing pre-populated Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, users can submit data into the system. A standard HL7 Clinical Document Architecture, Release 2 (CDA R2) report is generated and shared among all the participants according to the IHE Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) profile. Users can also search for existing documents based on desired selection criteria and can produce statistical reports from the shared data.

PHIAD is a joint project of IBM® Haifa and Alamden Research labs. All these engineers can be reached through e-mail.

Roni Ram is a research staff member in the Healthcare and Life Sciences group, IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL). She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer sciences from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Ms. Ram joined IBM HRL in 1996 and worked on several projects involving user interfaces and IP telephony. For the last three years, she has been working on interoperability among health care organizations.

Tzilla Eshel is a research staff member in the Healthcare and Life Sciences group, IBM Haifa Research Lab. She received her B.Sc in computer science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.

Sondra Renly is a researcher with the Healthcare Informatics project at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Ms. Renly holds a B.S. in medical technology and an M.S. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to joining IBM, she worked on the design, development, and implementation of public health and clinical laboratory information systems.

Sarah Knoop is a researcher at the IBM Almaden Research Center working on problems related to clinical data transformation, extraction, and exchange for private and public health applications and electronic infrastructure. Ms. Knoop graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2001 with a B.S. in computer science and honors mathematics and with a master's degree in computer science in 2004. Her interests include theoretical computer science, medical informatics, bioinformatics, and aspects of security and data mining.

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