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."

Re:Good data?

[RMH101]

In the UK you're banned from entering your doctor's surgery with flu-like symptoms. You get redirected to the NHS's Pandemic self-diagnosis expert system, which asks you about 10 questions (of which the important one is "do you have more than 2 of the following symptoms: fever, headache, nausea" etc). At the end it spits out a unique reference number for your flu-buddy to go and pickup your prescription of Tamiflu from a chemists. That's it. I did it last week for my partner - she's fine now.
The thing is, this will lead to overprescribing, and also is probably likely to encourage people to self certify themselves ill when they aren't - so they can have a week off work (no sicknote required for Swine Flu, as you can't get in to see your doctor) and get their supply of Tamiflu in before stocks run out...

Re:GE Healthcare

[idiotnot]

And Immelt is one of the big time White House visitors [nytimes.com]. With the health care division, and the "green" products, they stand to make a killing from this influence peddling. Not to mention their extension of the communications office, NBC News/MSNBC.

Re:Anonymous Coward

[rehtonAesoohC]

What I've heard from doctors and nurses around the DC area is that if you have flu-like symptoms outside of the flu season (which starts week 40), then they can be reasonably certain (99%) that it is H1N1.

Re:Good data?

[CKW]

Have you not looked at the raw statistics?

Right now, if you have flu, you have swine flu. Only something like 1/1,000 flu cases is "some other" flu. 99% of all cases tested, test positive for swine flu.