The PHIN Grid (and other great stuff)

I was at this year's Public Health Information Network (PHIN) conference again, held without fail in Atlanta (always on my kid's first week of school.) This meeting is always interesting to me because of the breadth of participants and the depth and importance of the topics. This year, with H1N1 flu topmost in everyone's mind, there was a special urgency from many of the participants to get the informatics of many public health efforts operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. Key to these efforts was leveraging the products of many other programs, with federal and local informatics teams often making extensive use of open source tools and technologies- the resulting talks were both inspiring and cool.

I attended as many of the grid- and cloud-related talks as I could fit in to the conference schedule, and was rewarded with a truly remarkable view of how the stakeholders throughout the PHIN enterprise have been able to leverage technology products from a wide range of programs to satisfy their unique public health requirements. It was inspiring to hear how the CDC has been using many of the tools developed by the National Cancer Institute's caBIG program, especially key parts of the caGrid infrastructure. Equally cool was how many of the key participants in the caBIG program have been directly involved in leveraging those capabilities in an entirely new setting. In particular, Tom Savel and his team talked at length in a number of sessions about using these Grid tools to implement a range of services, and about the challenges in using them in a public health setting, such as security and reliability . Hearing about how familiar tools like GAARDS, Grid Grouper and Introduce are being used in a new community was well worth the trip, as was hearing how facilities that the caBIG program has implemented, such as the Knowledge Centers, are providing important means of support in diverse settings of national (and even international) importance.

As much as I appreciate hearing the accolades and credit given to the caBIG program (and I do!) and as much as it is rewarding to see our community providing support to these important areas, I am reminded of how teams providing software and tools must continue to improve and iterate that software, and continue to ensure that the communities using these systems do not become detached from the processes used to create them. The Knowledge Centers and their staffs are clearly leading the way here, and it will be critical for them (and us) to continue to listen closely to what is happening "out there" and ensure that the needs get "in here." To that end, though, it is both inspiring and heartening to see that we have a growing, talented, committed and capable group who will not only consume the resources that the caBIG program's participants create, but who can also significantly contribute to the infrastructure's development. The challenge for caBIG is to come up with the most effective possibly means of incorporating these contributions, and ensuring that they mesh, support and inform the program going forward.

Onward and upward, PHIN! Every time I sneeze now, I am going to wonder if I can enter that event on some aspect of the emerging public health Grid.