Centers for Disease Control and Prevention picks Certara to develop technology platform

NJBIZ - 3/11/2019

Princeton-based Certara announced on Tuesday the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention has awarded it a contract to strengthen the agency’s death investigation and surveillance systems.
In a press release, Certara said that it would use its OpenPharma technologies and the CDC’s open functionality in OpenCDC, to create OpenMDI (Microsoft Document Imaging).
This new OpenMDI platform will improve the timeliness and quality of drug mortality data collected, and the interoperability of state electronic death registration systems.
The program was one of 10 focus areas identified by the CDC under its broad agency announcement through which it plans to use applied research to address emerging public health priorities.
“Enabling the CDC to upgrade its historical analysis approach to one that leverages predictive analytics and ‘near real time’ data to address global health challenges is at the core of Certara’s mission,” said Certara’s CEO Dr. Edmundo Muniz in a statement.
“We are privileged to be working alongside the CDC in creating a death surveillance system that aggregates disparate data in a secure and private structure facilitating decision-support analysis, visualization and reporting of toxicology and other key drug-induced death information to address the drug overdose crisis in this country,” Muniz said.
More than 130 Americans die from an opioid overdose every day, including prescription opioids and heroin,according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. More than 70,200 Americans are estimated to have died from a drug overdose in 2017. The sharpest increase occurred among deaths related to fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, synthetic opioids, with nearly 30,000 overdose deaths.
Certara’s open application programming interface specification compliant OpenPharma technology provides a large-scale, real-time services-based architecture platform from which to build health care solutions. OpenPharma is built to handle ingestion and transformation of a variety of data types, real-time processing of machine-to-machine transactions and secure, distributed collaboration using Hedera Hashgraph distributed ledger technology.
Certara said that these advances would help to maximize the efficiency and applicability of CDC’s response to current and evolving public health threats.