newsAlaska and Georgia Partner with Biospatial November 27, 2018November 27, 2018 (Falls Church, Va.) – The Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Public Health and the Georgia Department of Public Health have recently completed Data Use and Analytic agreements with Biospatial, Inc. These states will be submitting National Emergency Medical Services Information System (NEMSIS) data elements to the Biospatial Platform to both assist in national preparedness and enhance their ability to visualize and understand their data with other data layers of relevance.Biospatial develops partnerships with state and local data owners to bring health-related data into the Biospatial Platform; in turn, Biospatial provides data owners access to the Biospatial Platform tools at no cost. Data visualization, syndromic trends and alerts, summary dashboards, and clinical and operational reporting are provided to both data owners and federal and commercial subscribers to support preparedness and response, healthcare, pharmaceutical, automotive, and risk management markets.Biospatial continually enhances the available user interface, analytics, and services based on input from members of the collaborative. Several new syndromes and performance measures have been added recently. Users now can create custom alerts for more than twenty syndromes (e.g., patient falls, stroke, opioid overdose) which may be delivered by email or text message and can be shared with other users within the organization. New state and national performance measure benchmarks help data owners understand their operational performance and collaborate with other members to share best practices. Dashboards for trauma data and health facility status will be added in 2018.The addition of these new states increases the total number of participating state emergency medical services (EMS) offices to fifteen. This quantity of data provides Biospatial a unique ability to provide timely, national and regional syndromic detection, monitor real-time trends, and alert to syndromic anomalies that are critical to the nation’s health and safety. Many of these state offices also plan to link other data sources to their EMS data, including traffic crash records and trauma system data.Biospatial is working closely with the National Association of State EMS Officials (NASEMSO) to connect with state EMS offices. NASEMSO has partnered with Biospatial due to the value the analytics can provide to the NEMSIS data collected by state EMS offices. Biospatial has created a pathway to contribute to state-specific surveillance and offer real-time value to state epidemiologists and state health officers.Contact: Joe Ferrell joe@nasemso.org