Also in the News: IT key to kids' health data project

Ambitious government study to track health of 100,000 U.S. children from before birth to age 21 starts in January, InformationWeek reports.

Information technology will play a central role in an ambitious federal program to track the health of 100,000 U.S. children in 105 locations around the country from before birth to age 21, InformationWeek reports.

The National Institutes of Health's database project, which begins in January with a pilot program enrolling 1,250 infants from Queens, N.Y., and Duplin County, N.C., will make extensive use of IT to store and manage the data in a way that complies with the Federal Information Security Management Act, according to InformationWeek. 


"A major challenge is to provide an IT architecture that supports 105 study locations with additional field sites at each location that is FISMA-compliant and still reasonable easy to use," said Sarah Keim, deputy director for operations and logistics for the National Children's Study.