One area, or example of how Intelligent Healthcare can improve patient outcomes and Healthcare management to help illustrate exactly how it might work – Biosurveillance. This is a relatively new field within Healthcare and is directly related to National Security. A particularly timely context for this examination is the identification of Bioterrorism or epidemic events. Biosurveillance encompasses several related elements:

• The ability to track existing Health-related trends or conditions across demographic groups and geographic regions.
• The ability to identify new Health-related trends or conditions.
• The ability to compare Healthcare trends and conditions in any number of ways, including; historical comparisons, pattern (expectation) comparisons, outcome comparisons, treatment comparisons and so forth.

Scenario – A new flu virus has appeared with the potential for becoming a global pandemic; the scenario has several main components or challenges:

• The ability to determine the viral composition, symptomatic behavior (in humans) and point of origin.
• The ability to track the geographic and demographic spread of the virus / pathogen.
• The ability to facilitate rapid knowledge dissemination to support Public Health mitigation efforts (both nationally and globally).
• The ability to coordinate targeted research and care initiatives across geographically and organizationally separated groups.
• The ability to accurately anticipate or predict behavior, spread, mortality rates etc. in advance of actual occurrences.

The storyboard portrays a Pandemic or Epidemic Event as an arc across both time and participant perspectives. The most effective response scenarios thus involve reach back up through those views or communities to the local sources as quickly as possible. The other key element of IH in this storyboard is the ability for organizations to feed back knowledge and lessons learned across the ecosystem, thereby improving response on future incidents.