CDC Adopts Near Real-Time Flu Tracking System 102
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."
Re:And Look at How Useful It Is! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why on earth does the CDC need to use flash for a still, non interactive image??
Re:The really nice thing about this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Here's the thing: Why the fuck would anybody have a GE credit card?
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And Look at How Useful It Is! (Score:4, Insightful)
At first I thought the map updated dynamically via an xml, but it seems we have a flash movie that dynamically loads a big JPEG image and shows it - nothing more.
Improper use of a technology, nothing new.
Should I also count how many times I've seen a big js framework like jQuery being used for a trivial thing? I mean, load an entire 100Kb library to do something that could be done with 2-5 lines of javascript anyway...
Re:And Look at How Useful It Is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Are they correlating this data with the fear of people [slashdot.org] of getting H1N1 in an airplane?
I recently sent an e-mail to a local radio station after they read a news item stating that, so far this year, 12 people have died from the swine flu in my state. I sent them a letter because that's all that the news item said. It did not mention that about 1600 die of the regular old influenza every year. With all the hysteria about this issue I think some perspective is very badly needed. It's just piss-poor journalism to report a raw figure with no context like this.
Your comment about the fear of H1N1 made me think about the various ways that it's being encouraged. To me that's just media sensationalism, which is not really unusual because it sells. Is H1N1 a threat to some people? Probably so; I am not a doctor so I should not say too much on that. Do I personally feel threatened by it? Not in the slightest. It'd be a nuisance to me, but not a threat. There's no way I am going to cower in fear and alter my life over it. It is their own damned laziness but the fact is most people aren't going to do their own research on this one. If there were more perspective and context in media reports about H1N1, it would be much easier for others to make up their own minds as I have done.
Even if this is or were a true threat to life and limb, acting like a bunch of panicked animals is the wrong way to reduce a threat.
Re:The really nice thing about this... (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, so the evil the mega-corporation did was to loan someone who wanted money some money. What bastards.
(I use a credit card, but I don't carry a balance, I think people who do are crazy, the idea that someone would max out 9 credit cards out of 'necessity' isn't very credible, clearly they need to find a way to spend less money, or to earn more money)
Re:And Look at How Useful It Is! (Score:1, Insightful)
I had an epiphany while trying to describe attitudes like yours to someone else yesterday. I was trying to put into words why it aggravates me so much when it suddenly hit me. I was watching 3 or 4 live streams last year when the outbreak was first detected, and we were being bombarded with press conferences as one state after another started announcing how many cases they were treating. As it happens, I was in the middle of making my first serious attempt at writing a novel about a pandemic and all the hysteria it may cause. Of course, now that we're in the middle of one, there's really no point to finishing the book. Having said that, I had researched dozens of reports, information sites from both government and non-government entities, and other things like various states' emergency response plans. It was actually pretty cool having the various states' plans open while "following along" through live streaming on the net. Then someone wrote a post somewhere that aggravated me to my core. He wrote, "call me when there are 36,000 dead because that's how many die every year."
What his, and apparently your, thoughts about this don't take into account is that we may pass the typical number of fatalities on a single day as the body count rises from say, 28,000 to 42,000. In that hypothetical situation, you and that guy are ready to start caring. What are you going to do the next day when the count climbs from 42,000 to 60,000? At what point do you shit yourself? I watched a symposium on pandemic flu given by the NIH as part of my research, and I learned an interesting fact. During the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, approximately 4,500 people died in the City of Philadelphia during the course of *one week*.
Yet you two don't want to do anything until the death toll passes the normal annual figure. Please don't take my word for it. Do your own research. Spend just a little bit of time reading up on the topic. Think about the logistics, and hopefully you will form an opinion that you feel is well-informed and is something you can defend. But just turning your back and calling it scaremongering is irresponsible and dangerous. A lot of people are going to die during the second wave. If we wait until you suggest before taking action, it will be way too late.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Insightful)