“Personalized medicine brings to mind researchers doing complicated analysis of a single patient’s genetic makeup, and fine-tuning medicine and other treatments to those results. But Duke University Health System is using everyday data from patients’ electronic medical records combined with an analytics tool to personalize its approach to treating patients.
County health officials recently asked Duke how many of its patients would need priority access to the H1N1 flu vaccine. Duke used IBM Cognos to sift through information on the more than 20 million patients in its Oracle-based clinical data repository and in an hour was able to identify about 120,000 of them with risk factors, such as age, pregnancy, respiratory, and other conditions that made them vulnerable to complications from Swine flu. And now that the H1N1 vaccine is available, Duke is letting those patients know that they’re first in line to get it.”
Article
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, InformationWeek Healthcare, 13 November 2009
