eHealth plans national health network to fight epidemics like SARS

Computerworld - A consortium of public health agencies, hospitals, health care plans and medical IT systems vendors is working to create an automated early warning system to fight epidemics of new diseases such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) as well as provide alerts of bioterrorism attacks.
While some cities such as New York developed such systems after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. as a whole lacks a cohesive, standards-based system, according to Janet Marchibroda, CEO of the Washington-based eHealth Initiative Inc., which represents the health care-based consortium. But eHealth hopes to change that soon.
In June, eHealth and the New York-based Markle Foundation will kick off a three-month test of a Web-based National Healthcare Collaborative Network designed to electronically collect patient data from hospitals and automatically distribute it to public health agencies.
Nine hospitals from across the country, along with a number of local, state and federal agencies, plan to participate in the project, she said. Roughly 80% of the vendors in the health care industry also plan to participate.
Dr. Russell Ricci, general manager of IBM's global health care division, said automated syndromic surveillance -- the ability to capture information about symptoms such as high fever and respiratory problems -- would be a key component of the pilot project. Besides emergency room data, Ricci said, the program will also work to capture information about sales of over-the-counter medicine, because "drug store chains know a flu epidemic is coming before emergency rooms, based on the sales of tissues," Ricci said.
According to Ricci, the pilot project will show how sophisticated data mining techniques can be applied to the health care industry, which doesn't have an automated system to gather such key public health indicators. Ricci said the project would also demonstrate how to tie together stovepiped hospital information systems using industry-standard, off-the-shelf tools. Those tools are essential for the exchange of data in an industry replete with systems that can't share data with one another, he said.
Dr. Seth Foldy, health commissioner of the city of Milwaukee, welcomed the eHealth pilot project but said, "this is not going to be easy. ... Maybe eHealth can build a business case and demonstrate that it is possible."
Early warning syndromic surveillance systems provide information that diagnosis-based systems can't, he said. Diagnosis-based systems can often take days -- too late to provide an early warning of a coming epidemic. By contrast, syndromic systems can discern a problem much earlier, Foldy said.
Tracking SARS
Currently, Milwaukee uses a Web-based syndromic surveillance system