University of Pittsburgh • December 11, 2013
The Project Tycho™ database aims are to advance the availability and use of public health data for science and policy. We do this by acquisition of new data, by building infrastructure for data standardization, integration, quality control, and data redistribution, by developing innovative analytics, and by advocacy. Read more about aims and activities.
We named the Project Tycho™ database after the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (1546—1601), who is known for his detailed astronomical and planetary observations. Tycho was not able to use all of his data for breakthrough discoveries, but his assistant Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) used Tycho's data to derive the laws of planetary motion. Similarly, this project aims to advance the availablity of large scale public health data to the worldwide community to accelerate advancements in scientific discovery and technological progress.
Currently, we have completed digitization of the entire history of weekly Nationally Notifiable Disease Surveillance System (NNDSS) reports for the United States (1888-2013) into a database in computable format (Level 3 data). We have standardized a major part of these data for online access (Level 2 data). A subset of the U.S. data was cleaned further and used for a study on the impact of vaccination programs in the United States that was recently published in the NEJM (Level 1 data).
Click here to read an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine about Project Tycho™.