Fusion

The creation of a public health fusion center, which collects, analyzes, and disseminates health related information and intelligence, can contribute greatly to our understanding of public health issues. Natural and man-made agents can result in morbidity, with resultant acute or chronic injury, illness, or disease, as well as mortality. By aligning all potential agents along a continuous energy-matter spectrum, one can view any particular agent as part of this continuum. Guided by physics, the spectrum extends through energy waves, particles, atoms, molecules, macro-molecular complexes, to biological systems. It also includes all geophysical phenomena, weather events, and man-made agents and machines. Each individual energy-matter relationship can be viewed as a specific agent. The fusion center can be envisioned as a mechanism that scans this spectrum for any potential hazardous agent activity by the use of multiple, specific monitoring systems. The collected data streams can be analyzed at a centralized fusion center. The information and intelligence inputs arise from environmental monitoring systems, state laboratories, emergency medical service systems, hospitals, clinics, local health departments and private practices. Any agent, irrespective of type, passes through a sequence of levels to impact the affected individual. These levels include the environmental, monitoring, incident site, primary treatyment, secondary treatment, and community-based locations. A template can be established that intersects these various levels, addressing 25 identified essential issues, such as communication, policy and plannning. This serves as the basis for an in-depth analysis of metric-based deliverables and applied community service intervention strategy impacts on a 24/7 basis. It will bridge the artificial separations and loss of potential synergisms imposed by a silo-based view of various public health discipline systems.