HMS Profs Get $4.5M Grant

A team of Harvard Medical School professors received a $4.5 million federal grant last Wednesday to fund the development of a computer database to track and prevent outbreaks of disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded the grant to Richard Platt, who chairs the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention at Harvard Medical School (HMS), and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Dr. Kenneth D. Mandl, who is director of biopreparedness at Children’s Hospital, an HMS teaching hospital.

The grant will fund Platt and Mandl’s project to centralize large amounts of patient information in a computer database over the next three years. Mandl said the project aims to identify outbreaks of disease across populations and provide personally controlled electronic health records that will help doctors tailor health information to individual patients’ needs.

The database would greatly enhance the medical community and the government’s ability to respond to infectious epidemics, the researchers said.

“There are laws that require clinicians to report certain kinds of diseases,” Platt said. “Those communications are cumbersome and difficult and sometimes they don’t occur at all.”

The personal health records would also facilitate more individualized treatment, according to Mandl. For example, Mandl said that during the flu vaccine shortage earlier this year, the electronic system could have recommended vaccinations for high-risk patients only.

While Platt and Mandl will work with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and Children’s Hospital, the research will have global implications, Mandl said.

“The idea is to produce generalizable knowledge and generalizable tools,” he said. “All the software we produce is made available open source and free and is available for use by researchers and health departments.”

Platt added that the program should work with almost any existing medical records system.

Privacy advocates have voiced concerns about the possibility of the data being stolen and used to defraud the patients involved. While acknowledging the seriousness of this possibility, Mandl said that “security is paramount in our model.” He explained that the data will be stored on highly secure servers with firewalls and that each file will be individually encrypted.

“Everything that happens in a personal health record is under personal control,” he said. “There is no ‘Big Brother’ here.”