CDC Adopts Near Real-Time Flu Tracking System

CWmike writes "The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched an effort this week to better and more easily track for H1N1 and other seasonal influenza activity throughout the US. The CDC said it is now tracking data on 14 million patients from physician practices and hospitals stored on a database hosted by GE Healthcare. The data is submitted daily from physicians' offices and hospitals that use GE's electronic medical record system. The data is then uploaded to GE Healthcare's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium, 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 or weeks to make its way to the agency's medical staff for analysis. The medical data is normalized so that, for example, reports of hypertension, HTN, and high blood pressure all mean the same thing when a researcher enters a query against the data."

And Look at How Useful It Is!

[eldavojohn]

You can find the latest map on the CDC site [cdc.gov] and look at how helpful it is! Apparently everyone's boned except for DC, Georgia, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Since there's no report of flu in the Virgin Islands, I propose the government provides free plane tickets for anyone who isn't infected so that they might escape the wave of vomit brewing in our fair country.

But in all seriousness their report does have some decent data on it [cdc.gov].

Re:GE Healthcare

[QuantumRiff]

Yes.

They are a very big division of GE, that makes equipment, like X-Ray machines, and software, such as electronic medical record software...

Interestingly enough, someone there has recently said that as profitable as GE Healthcare is, it doesn't bring in as much money as GE as a whole pays for healthcare for its employees.

Re:And Look at How Useful It Is!

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never done software development for a government organization, have you?

I've seen sites like this put together in the past by large teams of "professional software development consultants". Even for a site that amounts to nothing more than an image that's changed a few times daily, you'll have reams and reams of architectural diagrams and documentation. You'll have massive class hierarchies. Four tiers (because three aren't abstract enough), each implementing MVC and loads of other design patterns. And don't forget CORBA and SOAP interfaces (although they'll never be used).

Most college students could put together something better in between a couple of classes, using a few lines of Perl.

Re:Good data?

[shadow349]

Back in July, the CDC told the states to not to bother to test people for H1N1; they should just count people that appear to have H1N1 symptoms as a positive test result since it is a "OMG! We're all fucked! Pig are flying and they have teh flu!" situation.

Of course, the fact that this overestimates the reported occurence of H1N1 by a factor of 5 to 50 times [cbsnews.com] is of no concern to us peasants.

Re:Good data?

[Neoprofin]

That's the problem I've had with the explosion of reported cases of swine flu. From what I'm told the phone lines aren't even manned by anyone who works in the health care industry, and there's roughly a 100% chance that if you call in with anything remotely flu like you'll be a reported case of swine flu before you get off the phone.