Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)
PHAC monitors global health with the help from Nstein Technologies and Microsoft
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Company Overview
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) serves as the nerve centre for Canada's expertise and research in public health, effectively coordinating efforts with other partners to identify, reduce and respond to public health risks and threats. As the hub for health surveillance and disease control programs, the Agency created the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response (CEPR), in July 2000, to serve as Canada's central point of coordination for public health security. Among its many responsibilities, the CEPR monitors outbreaks and global disease events through the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN).
Business Challenge
In addition to offering a number of practical support services to municipalities, provinces and territories and working to renew the public health system in Canada and support a sustainable health care system, the PHAC has international partners involved in first response and public health security through a network of public health, emergency health services, and emergency social services contacts.
The ability to quickly disseminate health information from media sources across the globe helps governments, international agencies and researchers quickly respond to potential public health threats. The PHAC and the CEPR needed to develop version II of the Global Public Health Intelligent Network that would cull through all incoming information and share it on a global scale, enabling a 24-7 processing of more than 10,000 news feeds in 7 different languages and reporting on outbreaks, infectious diseases, contaminated food and water, bio-terrorism, exposure to chemical and radio-nuclear agents, natural disasters, as well as product, drug and medical device safety.
The CEPR had already developed its own monitoring solution enabling the information collection from several news service providers, but the system could not work with different languages and had no advanced data analysis or early warning capabilities. To effectively monitor incoming news, the CEPR needed to quickly analyze multilingual sources, including news feeds and Web sites, detect proactively potential public health related issues and provide organized, relevant information on a real-time, 24-7 basis. This meant the CEPR needed a solution that was easily maintainable, reliable and customizable.
"Global events, like SARS or the avian flu, have demonstrated a need to track incidents around the world to help prepare for the local impact," says Mario Girard, President and CEO, Nstein Technologies. "There are a growing number of interested parties who want to subscribe to news alerts and we were glad to help the CEPR team support this demand."
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Solution
The CEPR entered into a Collaborative Research Agreement with Nstein Technologies, using Nstein’s early warning and advanced analytics solutions (based on its Global Intelligent Information Management technology platform) to find a way to turn its homegrown solution into a stable and robust early warning and monitoring solution. Acting as a human brain, Nstein’s technology makes it possible to understand all incoming news in native language, to analyze it, classify it upon topics and relevancy, extract specialized metadata from it (such as key concepts, peoples’ names, places, etc.), compare it, summarize it and finally translate it (machine translation) into the users’ own languages, all this in near real time.
To power the GPHIN II version, Nstein Technologies is relying on SharePoint Portal 2003 and Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services, enabling a global collaborative and content management environment that supports real time multilingual collaboration and now provides to GPHIN II scalable and reliable news monitoring system that anyone around the world with Internet access could use.
Monitoring foreign news
To provide a comprehensive overview of global trends and issues based on news reporting, the CEPR needed to analyze news sources in different languages.
With their legacy system, the CEPR did not have a way to support news from non-English sources. This limited its visibility of many regional events. Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services allows the CEPR to review news in Arabic, English, French, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and Spanish. Even more, with the help of Nstein’s machine translation technology component, they are able to review news in their own preferred language (even if they don’t read Arabic for example); and to do it directly from the SharePoint Portal.”
Beyond saving information, Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services allows users to perform full-text search for information in different languages. This scenario allows users to define their preferred language and receive GPHIN news in that language. In addition, if a user queries a specific word in a specified language (such as car in English), the search result will also contain items that do not have a direct reference to the specific word, but contain the word's equivalent in another language (such as car in English and voiture in French).
Supporting a growing base
“The CEPR needed a platform for collaboration and content management that could support multilingual data and easily be integrated into their existing media monitoring systems,” says Laurent Proulx, Senior VP and CTO, Nstein Technologies. “At the beginning of the process, we debated whether we should develop the entire solution ourselves or look for an off-the-shelf product. In this case, Windows SharePoint revealed to be the best product that the CEPR systems and Nstein’s technology could rely on.”
With seven Windows® Server 2003 and 2000 servers supporting Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services, Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 2003, SQL Server 2000 and Nstein’s solutions, over several hundreds of users from international public health organizations are able to access the CEPR’s Windows SharePoint Site which can scale to support hundreds of thousands of users. Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 supports load balancing for Web servers and server clustering technology for all data—including configuration, documents, and list data. In addition, the Windows platform allowed Nstein Technologies to embed its own technology components that could easily integrate with SharePoint technologies to create a more robust, customizable environment.
Sifting through information
The CEPR needed to create a workflow to allow its researchers to review and qualify content, so information could either be sent out to subscribers or disregarded. With over 10,000 news feeds coming in every day, they required an automated method to detect important health information from “noise”.
Adding connectors to Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 and building on its malleable framework, Nstein Technologies was able to add a workflow component to generate automatic notifications for researchers and move information from news feeds through Windows SharePoint and into Microsoft® SQL Server 2000. In addition, its Web Part infrastructure allows Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services servers, sites, and site content to be exposed to the Web by comprehensive Windows® .NET–based object model and industry-standard Web services.
Nstein’s early warning component therefore qualifies information. If this information is important, it is automatically detected. If it is not relevant, the information is discarded. If there’s a “gray zone”, the researcher will review the information and decide if it’s important or not.
After the information is reviewed, it is stored in the Microsoft SQL 2000, enabling users to access it at any time.
Business Benefits
Updating its legacy system to a SharePoint platform enabled the CEPR to increase the relevancy of its system and processes, as it can review and distribute multilingual documents. SharePoint also provides the CEPR with a solution that is independent of the end-user PC environment.
“The more news sources the CEPR can monitor and classify, the more accurate picture they can create for organizations like the World Health Organization or the Center for Disease Control,” says Laurent Proulx. “Not only this information is vital to anticipating and planning for potential health threats but the tool itself is invaluable for other Canadian and worldwide government agencies.”
Early warnings
As information flows through Microsoft® Windows® SharePoint® Services and is flagged as important news, it is automatically classified into different areas of interest. End users can browse through these areas of interest and sign up to view alerts on news that meet their search criteria. This intuitive Audience function can be used to target content to users based on their preferences, either targeting content within Web Parts, so that members of different Audiences see different content, or targeting items to one or more Audiences, so that only those Audiences view the targeted items.
The Alerts function in Windows SharePoint allows users to control what information they view, enabling even more personalized content delivery. With the Automatic Notification function, users sign up to receive only alerts about the subjects they’re interested in.
With the Full-Text Search function, users can query for each (or any) terms in each of the documents the CEPR stores in its SQL 2000 database. This is done by extracting terms’ information in each document and storing this information in a way that is easy to retrieve. When a query is processed, the engine compares the documents using a metadata index and chooses the ones that are most relevant to the query.
Global impact, local interest
When an article appears in any of the seven languages supported by GPHIN, the user will automatically receive the article either in its original language or translated, based on user preference.
The ability to work in a multilingual environment allows the CEPR to extend the reach of their monitoring system to English and French Canada but also across different continents. “We live in a connected world – it’s important for the CEPR to know what is occurring across the globe and ensure they can develop appropriate risk management, control and prevention measures and responses―SharePoint is the tool that connects them,” says Laurent Proulx.
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For More Information
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For more information about Nstein Technologies, call (514) 908-5406 or visit the Web site at: www.nstein.com
For more information about Public Health Agency of Canada, visit the Web site at: www.phac-aspc.gc.ca
