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May 26, 2005

RODS lab called “exemplary”

The Rand Corp.’s Center for Domestic and International Health Security has cited Pitt’s Realtime Outbreak and Disease Surveillance (RODS) Laboratory as an exemplary practice in a recent report, “Exemplary Practices in Public Health Preparedness.”

The report was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Public Health Emergency Preparedness.

The RODS Laboratory, part of the Center for Biomedical Informatics, is a collaboration between Pitt researchers and the Auton Lab in Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science.

RODS is an electronic syndromic surveillance system that collects information such as emergency room registration data and lab results from existing computer systems in hospitals and other settings on a real-time basis so that it can be analyzed to detect emerging public health concerns.

Rand cited the RODS lab in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s focus area on Public Health Surveillance and Detection Activities. RODS was cited as an exemplary practice for its innovative collaboration between public health organizations and other industries to collect information on national public health conditions.

In addition, the Rand report cited a paper co-authored by Michael M. Wagner, the RODS lab director and associate professor of medicine and intelligent systems at Pitt — one of only five cited articles in the report.


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