NBIC Biofeeds: A Digital Tool for Open Source Biosurveillance across Federal Agencies

Introduction The NBIC integrates, analyzes, and distributes key information about health and disease events to help ensure the nation’s responses are well-informed, save lives, and minimize economic impact. NBIC serves as a bridge between Federal, State, Local, Territorial, and Tribal entities to conduct biosurveillance across human, animal, plant, and environmental domains. The integration of information enables early warning and shared situational awareness of biological events to inform critical decisions directing response and recovery efforts. To meet its mission objectives, NBIC utilizes a variety of data sets, including open source information, to provide comprehensive coverage of biological events occurring across the globe. NBIC Biofeeds is a digital tool designed to improve the efficiency of reviewing and analyzing large volumes of open source reporting by biosurveillance analysts on a daily basis; moreover, the system provides a mechanism to disseminate tailored feeds allowing NBIC to better meet the specific information needs of individual, interagency partners. The tool is currently under development by the Department of Energy (DOE), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and it is in a testing and evaluation phase supported by NBIC biosurveillance subject matter experts. Integration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE) is also underway. NBIC Biofeeds Version 1 is expected to be fully operational in Fiscal Year 2017.