CDC Adopts Near Real-Time Flu Tracking System

The Centers for Disease Control have settled on a private, nationwide database with the electronic medical records of 14 million people run by General Electric in order to track potential outbreaks of the H1N1 virus.

By Lucas Mearian

November 05, 2009 — Computerworld — Dr. Chris Crow, a family physician in Plano, Texas, said that in 10 years of practicing medicine, he's never seen flu spread like it has in the past six weeks. Crow said he has been treating at least three new flu patients a day over that time.

"It has been absolutely incredible watching this," said Crow, who runs Village Health Partners, a practice with 10 physicians. "When we had the initial H1N1 scare back in the spring, the county and state health departments were absolutely overwhelmed with the volume of calls and tests being reported to them."

At that time, county and state officials were so overwhelmed, they told doctors to stop sending in test results because they couldn't handle the volume, Crow said. But, that changed this week when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an effort to better and more easily track for H1N1, or Swine Flu , and other seasonal influenza activity throughout the United States.

The CDC said it is now tracking data on 14 million patients from physician practices and hospitals that is stored on a relational database hosted by GE Healthcare , General Electric Co.'s health care division. The data is submitted daily from physician's offices and hospitals that use GE's electronic medical record (EMR) system. The data is then uploaded to GE Healthcare's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a database repository designed with HIPAA-compliance parameters of patient anonymity and best practices where it can be the subject of medical data queries.

The CDC can perform queries to look for flu-like symptoms being reported by physicians, and then disseminate the data for health care providers and local government officials throughout the country, who can alert businesses and others about flu outbreak hot spots.

The CDC also hopes its analysis of the data helps it better understand the characteristics of H1N1 outbreaks and to determine who is most at risk for developing complications from the virus.

Prior to implementing the new system, the CDC relied heavily on tracking insurance claims data, which could take days, if not weeks, to make its way to the agency's medical staff for analysis.

"You not only want to get the data from here to there, but then you also have to say I need to normalize that data," said Dr. Mark Dente, chief medical informatics officer for GE Healthcare IT. "For example, if one doctor says hypertension, another says HTN and someone else says high blood pressure, it all means the same thing when you enter a query against the data."

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