Posit Team and ICF: At the forefront of the CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative
Company
ICF is a global consulting and technology services provider who has supported the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a U.S. federal public health agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (U.S. HHS), for over forty (40) years.
Size:
9,000 employees
Industries:
Consulting – Federal IT Modernization, Federal Health, Disaster Management, Transportation, Environment, Aviation, International Development, and Community Development
Technology used:
Posit Team (Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Posit Package Manager), Posit Academy
Brooke Rivera, MPH, MBA, Senior Program Director at ICF, is focused on health data insights work. She serves as the Program Manager for CDC’s NSSP BioSense Platform Support Team. She shared how the Posit suite of tools, e.g., Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, and Posit Package Manager, as well as Premium Plus Support, enable an open and transparent collaboration framework for partnering on critical public health surveillance and response efforts nationwide.
From limited-use application to advanced analytics platform
Deployed in an emergency capacity to detect and monitor bioterrorism after the 2001 Anthrax attacks against the U.S. Postal Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) BioSense Platform has since evolved into the largest, most sophisticated public health surveillance system at the CDC and preeminent syndromic surveillance system in the world.
Under CDC leadership and direction, ICF partnered with Johns Hopkins University - Public Health Lab (JHU-PHL) and data science solutions providers, such as Posit to transform the platform from a limited-use application to an advanced analytics platform, currently among the nation’s most valuable surveillance assets serving critical public health mission objectives.
In support of CDC’s vision to advance the science of syndromic surveillance and accelerate stakeholder adoption, ICF championed a novel approach in 2015, partnering with Posit to develop a centralized, cloud-hosted collaboration workspace hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
This new community-based approach enabled complex surveillance operations at the federal, state, tribal, local, and territorial levels providing invaluable insights in real time via advanced diagnostic, descriptive and predictive analytics techniques, geospatial and data visualizations in a virtualized environment.
This transformation positions NSSP’s BioSense Platform at the forefront of CDC’s Data Modernization Initiative (DMI) where timely and actionable data; interoperable systems and shared services; strengthened collaboration with federal, state, and local partners; and expanded informatics capacity are informing decision-making and driving a coordinated public health response.
Whether monitoring E-Cigarette, or Vaping, Product Use-Associated Lung Injury (EVALI), the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine safety, the opioid epidemic, social determinants of health and healthcare inequities, natural disasters, emerging zoonotic diseases, injury prevention, chronic illness, or behavioral health threats, the BioSense Platform, maintained and operated by ICF, and powered by Posit Team, has proven paramount to the nation’s strategic public health preparedness and emergency response framework, an indispensable instrument of the nation’s biosecurity apparatus.