CDC girding to open its cloud to public health

Grazed from Government Health IT. Author: Tom Sullivan.

Tom Savel, MD, is that rare breed of physician who contends his real goal in life is to be a technologist. Savel, like any IT guy worth his weight in geek, thinks big – which is exactly how what started as a software-testing sandbox five years ago is now on the cusp of being a quiver of cloud computing capabilities offered to state and local public health entities.

Within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Savel is the director of the Informatics Research and Development Activity (IRDA), under the Public Health Surveillance and Informatics Program Office. The CDC is about to open IRDA’s cloud services to federal, state, and local public health departments…

Modest roots
Back in 2007, a tiny little entity came together around a handful of machines, serving the CDC internally. Specifically, the lab focused on testing whether applications worked with Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008, according to Dale LaValley, IRDA lead engineer…

Read more from the source @ http://www.govhealthit.com/news/cdc-girding-open-its-cloud-public-health