Aggregate MDS Service planning

Tom and John presented the FY09 plan to the NCPHI governance council last week. A rather decent size block of work that the NCPHI R&D lab is planning is the development of a set of summary data services and associated coordination services.

These services will be an extension of the RODSA-DAI work and will provide access to various biosurveillance systems hosted by partners out in the states. Each service will return a set of aggregate syndrome counts that will map to a new common data structure that for now we are calling the "Aggregate Minimum Data Set". The AMDS will use the AHIC/HITSP MDS and select the minimum useful fields for aggregate reporting. The work on developing a scientifically vetted AMDS is in progress and so far is involving the Centers of Excellence and CDC BioSense personnel.

So the idea is that there will be multiple implementations of the AMDS services for each participating biosurveillance system and then a set of coordination services that know how to run a federated query across the participating nodes and combine together the results from the query. This is basically what the PHDGInet and RODSA-DAIWeb demos shows as a proof of principle, but 2009 will bring this to a proper pilot by developing services for actual installed biosurveillance systems running at partner sites.

Here's a list of the initial set of services that will support the pilot:

• AMDSX-DAI (Where X is one service for each participating system, in 2009 probably 5 different implementations planned for RODSA, ESSENCE, BioSense and specific state systems)


• AMDSCoordinator.RunFederatedQuery


• AMDSCoordinator.QueryAvailableCoverageArea