Telehealth Biosecurity Analysis Powered by SHIC Outbreak Program

In an article published by National Hog Farmeron February 3, 2026, Dr. Michele Moncrief, a post-doctoral research associate with the Swine Medicine Education Center at Iowa State University, detailed a recently completed study on telehealth-based biosecurity hazard analysis. Funded by the Iowa Pork Producers Association, the study examined the use of telehealth technologies as an option for expanding biosecurity evaluation capacity without increasing on-farm traffic and employed the Swine Health Information Center-fundedStandardized Outbreak Investigation Program.   

Designed to help veterinarians and producers identify and prioritize risks for pathogen entry, the SHIC-funded SOIP enables a consistent approach across individual users and farms. Goals of the SOIP output are to prevent disease introduction and prepare for seasonal challenges so that production systems can enhance biosecurity control measures accordingly.    

Dr. Moncrief and team used the SOIP rather than developing a new assessment tool. “SOIP offers a structured, systematic framework for identifying and evaluating biosecurity hazards,” she stated. “We chose to build upon an established, field-validated program that is already recognized and used within the swine industry.”  Using SOIP allowed the ISU team to align methods with real-world investigations, a process made easier due to their familiarity with the investigation platform. Dr. Moncrief described SOIP as a reliable foundation for evaluating how telehealth-based methods could be applied to biosecurity hazard analysis.   

The structure offered by SOIP breaks biosecurity risk into clearly defined categories: entry events, operational procedures, and site characteristics. “This makes it well-suited for evaluating new technologies like telehealth. Because the framework already organizes observations in a consistent and repeatable way, it allowed us to directly compare findings from traditional on-site evaluations with remote, telehealth-based assessments,” Dr. Moncrief explained. “This consistency helped ensure that the differences we observed were related to the evaluation method itself rather than changes in how hazards were assessed.”  

During the study, Dr. Moncrief said remote reviewers recognized many of the same risks observed during on-site analyses. “Agreement was strongest for clearly observable infrastructure and procedures, while more complex, multi-step practices were more challenging to evaluate remotely and depended on the completeness of the video footage,” she remarked. “Overall, the results suggest that SOIP supports comparable assessments across delivery methods when supported by standardized data collection and training.”  

And those results speak directly to the study findings. As Dr. Moncrief wrote in the National Hog Farmerarticle, “Overall, remote evaluators identified many of the same biosecurity hazards as the on-site investigator. Across more than 4,200 question-level comparisons, agreement between in-person and telehealth-based evaluations averaged about 63%. In practical terms, this means that telehealth captured a meaningful portion of the biosecurity picture, but not all of it.”