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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."
Why on earth does the CDC need to use flash for a still, non interactive image??
Here's the thing: Why the fuck would anybody have a GE credit card?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Because its the only one they could get after their other nine cards were maxed out?
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...
Are they correlating this data with the fear of people 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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Through sentinel site tracking, among other methods The government isn't stopping you getting tested, it's just providing a guideline. From a clinical point of view unless you a really sick or at risk of complications, there is really not much to be gained by knowing whether you have H1N1 or some other influenza strain, or even if it is influenza rather than say parainfluenza, rhinovirus, adenovirus, coronavirus, human respiratory syncytial virus etc etc.