The ALPHA Project: an architecture for leveraging public health applications.
OBJECTIVE
Public health surveillance applications are central to the collection, analysis and dissemination of disease and health information. As these applications evolve and mature, it is evident that many of these applications must address similar requirements, such as policies, security and flexibility. It is important a software architecture is created to meet these requirements.


METHODS
We outline the requirements for a public health surveillance application, and define a set of common components to address these requirements. These components are configured to produce services used in the development of public health applications.


RESULTS
A layered software architecture, the ALPHA architecture, has been developed to support the development of public health applications. The architecture has been used to build eleven surveillance applications for the Public Health Agency of Canada in the areas of disease surveillance, survey, distributed data collection and inventory management.


CONCLUSIONS
We have found that a software architecture that addresses requirements on policies, security and flexibility facilitates the development of configurable public health applications. By creating this architecture, key success factors, such as reducing cost and time-to-market of applications, adapting to changing surveillance targets and increasing user efficiency are achieved.
Turner
Cameron
C
Information Technology Management Section, Public Health Agency of Canada, 130 Colonnade Road (A.L. 6501J), Ottawa, Ont., Canada K1A 0K9. Cameron_Turner@phac-aspc.gc.ca
Bishay
Hany
H
Peng
Bo
B
Merifield
Aaron
A
D002170:Canada; D003141:Communicable Diseases; D006801:Humans; D009313:National Health Programs; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D011159:Population Surveillance / Q000379:methods*; D012985:Software Design