EpiCast Prototype

This is a repository for [email protected] to explore concepts about the EpiCast protocol.

EpiCast is

A proposed technical solution to for public health programs to share case information with CDC, each other and the public.

EpiCast is a follow-up project to the earlier Case Surviellance Discover sprint that the CDC/USDS conducted to create a NNDSS sytem that was:

1. Excellent on new and emerging diseases and conditions
2. Supported current standards and facilited the emergence of new standards
3. Supported bidirection/multidirectional collaboration between states and cdc
4. Built on cloud-first and DMI principles
5. Free from syncronization and aggregate total errors

EpiCast supports the construction of such a system with reasonable costs.

• Human and machine readable - Simple enough for humans to read, structured and standardized enough that machines can acess the data.
• Flexible - Data dictionaries to handle data element changes, local and national, that occur in an new outbreak.
• Scalable - Support pandemic scale. From 1 to 1M data items per month.
• Sustainable - Standardized, open-source reference implementations, free tooling and services.
• Secure - Support both public and private feeds.

In broad sense, EpiCast supports the CDC's NorthStar architecture, the open data movement, and the CDC's DMI direction for NNDSS.

Current ideas

• Publish complete data sets instead of sending individual messages.
• States are the source of truth for data set
• Use CSV because it is understood by both epidemiolgist and data scientists.
• Support for supplemental datatypes including FHIR, and HL7 messages.
• Take important ideas from TESSY including validation language and support from aggregates
• Define a schema language
• Validation done on entry by using a computable language (CQL inspired)
• Logging of events in the feed.
• Use S3 Buckets and Azure Blobs as the base protocol because all cloud vendors can support these protocols

Getting Started

cd demo and follow readme.md