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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."
You can find the latest map on the CDC site 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.
My work here is dung.
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.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
If it's antidotal, he's probably cured now.
English is not this
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...
Real time flu tracking, eh? Let's all sneeze at once and see if we can crash it.