The Big Brother of Influenza: Someone knows way before your doctor does

So far, this flu season has been pretty lame.  Unlike the H1N1 flu outbreak of 2009 -2010 which sent panicked citizens searching for a flu shot, this year, the trend is pretty typical.

Sporadic cases across the country. Business as usual.

But if things do heat up out there and the flu begins to hit big time, someone is going to know well before your doctor, even before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Who, Big Brother?   Google!

By "monitoring health seeking behavior in the form of queries to online search engines" google can predict a flu epidemic perhaps 2 weeks or more before it is reported by the CDC.  Google's monitoring of web inquiries is real time whereas the CDC relies on a reporting structure via state health departments. When people feel sick, they web search their symptoms and suggested treatments for the flu.  Google analyzes these search trends and can do it all over the world.  Although the CDC's statistical analysis and geo-mapping is the gold standard, it takes time.

On this chart from Google, the blue line represents search trends related to the flu and the orange line is actual flu cases as reported by the CDC.  Pretty impressive.

 Now add to this work being done at the community level by networks of health care providers such as the Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services and others who are collaborating with the CDC to monitor real time health care data right from the doctor's office as markers of flu outbreaks.  Let's say thousands of elderly visit their doctor in Chicago next week with a fever, cough and body aches and that temperature and symptom data is sent, real time, to the CDC.  The data is de-identified, to protect privacy.  The CDC then uses this information to immediately predict flu hot spots, do targeted virus identification tests, rush additional vaccine or plan to target increased supplies of medication.

If Google, the CDC and networks of health providers know all this information as nature actually takes its course, some might cry "Foul,  Big Brother again."  But I think it's a good thing. It's protects privacy and it's accurate.  So go ahead and get your flu shot if you haven't done so already, before Big Brother tells you it's too late.

Smooth Go-Live For Electronic Health Record at Erie Humboldt Park

Smooth sailing and cool heads characterized the go-live for Erie Humboldt Park's electronic health record system.

Erie successfully launched it’s Alliance-hosted Electronic Health Record (EHR) system at Erie Humboldt Park on Thursday April 24, 2008. This is Erie's second large site to go live. Erie West Town turned on its electronic health record in August 2006.

The Alliance of Chicago Community Health Services, LLC was formed by 4 community health centers (Erie Family Health Center, Heartland Heatlth Outreach, Howard Brown Health Center and Near North Health Services) to improve the delivery of quality health care to underserved patient populations. The mission is to share resources and to integrate services thereby enhancing quality and economies of scale.

The centerpiece of the Alliance's mission to improve health care quality is to provide a centralized hosting model for a robust electronic health record system. The system has been customized to meet the needs of underserved patient populations with disproportinate shares of diseases such as HIV, diabetes, heart disease, asthma late entry into prenatal care and obesity.

Alliance partners use General Electric's Centricity EMR.

Erie Humboldt Park is a large site with 21 exam rooms. Approximately 35,000 patient visits are conducted there annually.

There is no easy flick of a switch to launch an EHR even if you have done it at another site within your own organization before. EMR products are not ready to go out of the box such as a software product you might puchace for your home computer. The essentials include a well organized internal implementation team with a sponsor who is an executive within the organization and an information technology team that knows what it is doing. The Alliance provided the professionals who can design the implementation, train the endusers and host the service.

Superior technical support, training and overall design and help support was provided by the Alliance throughout the process.

With the addition of Erie Humboldt Park to the electronic health record system, Erie’s 2 largest sites will provide over 80,000 patient visits annually in the electronic environment.

The Alliance-hosted EHR is on target to cover over 100,000 individual patients through over 350,000 anual patient visits in Chicago alone with its EHR. Aliance has expanded its services to host the EHR at heath centers from San Francisco, to North Carolina.

I'll post some photos soon.

Adelante!

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