The Climate Change and Health Gateway (CCHG) for Enhancing Biomedical, Health, an

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Climate Risk Analysis Division of Lumenetec, LLC, proposes to develop the Climate Change and Health Gateway (CCHG), an innovative and ground-breaking software tool that will radically enhance biomedical, health andclimate-change informatics. CCHG will empower decision-makers in both the public and private sectors by providing critical, quantitative information of the health impacts of climate change in a GIS-based platform. The proposed technology will enable non-technical decision makers to systematically leverage the outputs of high-end Global Climate Model (GCM) simulations for understanding, predicting and responding to the health impacts of climate change. CCHG will support the National Library of Medicine's mission of enabling biomedical research, supporting health care and public health, and promoting healthy behavior by significantly enhancing its information services relevant to environmental health, health services research, and public health. Therefore, decision-makers from individual citizens to regional and national governments will be able to confidently formulate mitigation and adaption strategies in order to reduce the adverse effects of climate change on human health. Lumenetec's proposed CCHG technology will benefit the public as a whole by increasing awareness of the adverse effects of climate change on human health. In the Phase I, Lumenetec proposes to work with a team of experts from academia, industry, and regional governments to: 1) conduct a needs analysis; 2) design and build a CCHG prototype; 3) demonstrate the feasibility of CCHG using real data; and, 4) plan for the Phase II program. In the Phase II, Lumenetec will build on the Phase I prototype to further develop CCHG, resulting in a stable,user-friendly, commercial product. In addition, Lumenetec will launch a client pilot program in the Phase II and will aggressively commercialize CCHG among the numerous climate change stakeholders identified in the Phase I. This program will result in a complete, turnkey solution that will enable the various stakeholders of the health impact assessment community to leverage the outputs of current and future long-term simulations of Global Climate Models for the quantitative assessment of the health effectsof climate change. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Lumenetec's Climate Change and Health Gateway (CCHG) will radically enhance the integration of climate change, biomedical, and health information, thereby providing a more complete picture of the relationships between climate and disease for specific populations, locations, or health conditions. In addition, CCHG will permit users to merge data from many sources and to mine the data for discovering, visualizing, and testing hypotheses about the climate effects on particular diseases or population groups. As a result, CCHG will benefit the public as a whole by providing decision makers from individual citizens to regional and national governments with critical information for understanding, predicting andresponding to the adverse health impacts of climate change.