| abstract | - As mandated in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) BioSense Program was launched in 2003 to establish an integrated national public health surveillance system for early detection and rapid assessment of potential bioterrorism-related illness. It was developed and implemented in accordance with data and message standards defined by the PHIN initiative. BioSense collects electronic data that are voluntarily shared by participating state, local, and other federal public health entities, including data related to infections, injuries, and chronic diseases. Currently the system collects chief complaint data from 570 hospitals and 1,100 federal clinics, and sales data from over 10,000 pharmacies. Because the data and messages are sent and received in standardized formats, the data are integrated into the BioSense system, reducing the need for analysts to manually interpret or manipulate data and are analyzed by the system to enhance the nationwide situational awareness capabilities of public health analysts at CDC.
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