Altarum Wins AWS Imagine Grant to Transform Disease Surveillance with AI

December 08, 2025

Novi, Michigan (12/08/2025): Altarum has been named a winner of the prestigious 2025 Amazon Web Services (AWS) Imagine Grant in the Go Further, Faster category, to develop PHusion, a real-time public health disease surveillance system. In collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Altarum will create the PHusion platform, combining generative AI and cloud services to tackle one of public health’s most persistent challenges: fragmented data that slows response. 

“By combining Altarum’s public health expertise with AWS’s AI innovations, we’re reimagining what’s possible in epidemic response,” says Altarum CEO Max Entman. “We see a future where health officials can intervene in hours instead of weeks—harnessing the best technology to protect communities and save lives.” 

The Challenge: Fragmented Data, Slower Response
Public health serves as a critical bulwark against disease outbreaks and environmental hazards, protecting community wellbeing and saving lives. To perform this critical role, public health agencies rely on disease surveillance systems to identify, track, and intervene against threats to community health. However, data that powers decisions arrives from laboratories, hospitals, clinics, and coroners' offices and flows into fragmented, siloed databases. PHusion will harmonize this data into a unified database, accelerating analysis, decision making, and intervention, improving overall public health, reducing disease transmission, and lowering the public cost-burden of disease treatment.

Altarum’s Solution: Unified Intelligence for Public Health
Built on AWS’ scalable infrastructure, the system will streamline data integration, reduce costs, and deliver actionable intelligence. Specifically, it will:

  • Integrate multiple public health reporting pipelines into a single, cohesive dashboard.
  • Use generative AI to automate data processing and extract data from questionnaires.
  • Leverage AWS SageMaker and AWS analytics to detect patterns and anomalies in real time.
  • Apply AI-enabled data safety protections to ensure HIPAA-level data security and privacy.
  • Provide a user-friendly interface that turns raw data into actionable insights—no technical expertise required.

Why It Matters
PHusion will transform days of manual work into seconds of automated analysis. Public health teams will be able to act more quickly, more precisely, and more proactively, spotting emerging threats before they escalate and deploying interventions that save lives.

What’s Next
This project marks the beginning of a new era in disease surveillance—one powered by AI, cloud technology, and a commitment to faster, smarter public health interventions. Altarum’s leadership and development teams are already at work to deliver a proof of concept by early 2027 and pilot programs are planned in collaboration with state health departments to modernize public health. With support from AWS, Altarum is building a future where no outbreak goes unnoticed and no community is left behind.

For more details contact: Dr. Eric Whitebay | eric.whitebay@altarum.org