CDC and ChoiceMaker in Multi-million Dollar Deal for Nationwide Disease Surveillance System

    /24-7PressRelease/ - NEW YORK, NY, December 16, 2005 - ChoiceMaker Technologies, Inc., a leading supplier of record matching software, announced today that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has selected their software for use with the National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) applications that CDC is developing.

ChoiceMaker's patented, Artificial Intelligence-based software will be embedded in the PAM Development Platform, a CDC-built NEDSS product. These applications will be made available for deployment for all fifty states, as well as several U.S. territories in the next few years, and will play a role in improving the nation's ability to identify and track emerging infectious diseases and potential bioterrorism attacks.

Scott Danos, the NEDSS Project Lead Public Health Analyst at CDC, said, "We intend to standardize on ChoiceMaker as the record matching system of choice throughout the NEDSS platform."

When applied to the national health registry, ChoiceMaker's software ensures that false alarms are not raised due to duplicate reports of the same case. In the event of an emergency, it would be critical that public health professionals have a clean list of those affected, so as not to waste time on multiple interventions with the same individual.

Andrew Borthwick, Ph.D., President and CEO of ChoiceMaker, said, "With catastrophic epidemics, from diseases such as avian flu or bioterrorism, a current major public concern, ChoiceMaker is proud to be a part of this crucial tracking system. The NEDSS application presents a challenging problem, to which ChoiceMaker is well suited."

NEDSS requires a deployment at many sites and integration with many different middleware platforms, databases, and hardware configurations. CDC reports that in the event of a major epidemic, the system must be able to handle millions, or even tens-of-millions of records. These requirements are easily met by ChoiceMaker's high-speed algorithms, cross-platform Java technology, and EJB and Web Services interfaces.

About the Centers for Disease Control
CDC protects the health and safety of the public by preventing and controlling diseases and injuries. They enhance health decisions by providing credible information on critical health issues, and they promote healthy living through strong partnerships with local, national, and international organizations. For more information, please visit http://www.cdc.gov, or call (800) CDC-INFO.


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About ChoiceMaker
New York City-based ChoiceMaker Technologies has developed a patent-pending machine-learning system, ChoiceMaker 2.0, which matches records of people, businesses, or other entities in large databases filled with inconsistent information. Working from a small set of examples, the system learns the human intuition for determining when two records represent the same real-world person or entity and applies this knowledge at run-time. The Java-based system is highly portable across databases and operating systems, is highly customizable to the error patterns of different data, and can be tightly integrated with a client's application and database. Founded in 1998, ChoiceMaker is a rapidly-growing company with a highly talented staff which includes four computer science Ph.D.'s.

Press Contact:
Ashley Larive, Director of Corporate Communications
ChoiceMaker Technologies, Inc.
[email protected]

ChoiceMaker Technologies represents the most sophisticated data quality, approximate database searching and record matching, record linking, and deduplication software available on the market today. Ours is a powerful, fast, flexible, and accurate multi-platform data cleansing solution.

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