The program, which aims to help officials prepare for and respond to a pandemic of avian flu or a bioterrorist attack, will add 350 hospitals to the list this year.

To support the program, the Atlanta-based federal agency has been scrambling to upgrade its IT infrastructure so it's capable of receiving and analyzing the massive influx of data.

At this point, the CDC's systems are about a month away from being able to analyze incoming data from the initial 31 private hospitals during a catastrophic event, said Barry Rhodes, associate director for technology and informatics in the Division of Emergency Preparedness and Response at the CDC's National Center for Public Health Informatics.

"The amount and rate of data streams to CDC is really unprecedented [compared with] what we have done in the past," he said.

As part of the IT upgrade, the CDC is building a real-time data warehouse that will support 20TB to 30TB of data over the next 12 to 18 months, Rhodes said.