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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a total of $4.37 million in grants to fund four new Centers of Excellence in Public Health Informatics. The centers will be located at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care in Massachusetts, Indiana University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah.

Each center will conduct two new projects to support national priorities in informatics and support real-time biosurveillance for potential public health threats.

Harvard Pilgrim will study personally controlled health records and social networks, and electronic support for public health to treat diabetes. The goal is to further integration of personal health records and electronic health records.

Indiana University will research bringing public health to the point of care via information technology and enhancing basic infrastructure to support public health. One goal is integrating health information exchange across the private and public sectors. Another goal targets standardization of data sets across the state.

The University of Pittsburgh will look at automating case detection using clinical data. It will use probability-driven statistical methods to support outbreak detection and characterization. The goal is to speed the nation's ability to detect and characterize cases of disease and outbreaks.

The University of Utah will study visual analytics and decision support for core public health missions, and just-in-time delivery of "dynamically maintained" public health knowledge. The goal is to address decision support needs for public health professionals engaged in disease control.

--Joseph Goedert