Derek Spalding, timescolonist.com
“Michelle Ferguson tried to avoid it, but the rapid onslaught of nausea took its toll on her body when she suddenly vomited in the back seat of a school bus last weekend.
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Dan Bowman, FierceHealthIT
“Why wait for a slow, clunky government report to learn about illness trends in your area when, with the click of a mouse, you can do so in near real time? That’s the gist of a report published this week in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which concludes that targeted Internet traffic can serve as a good predictor of patient activity for hospitals.
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Dugas AF et al, Clinical Infectious Diseases, 2012
Background.
Google Flu Trends (GFT) is a novel Internet-based influenza surveillance system that uses search engine query data to estimate influenza activity and is available in near real time. This study assesses the temporal correlation of city GFT data to cases of influenza and standard crowding indices from an inner-city emergency department (ED).
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Faye Flam, Philly.com
“As a biologist and computer scientist, Pennsylvania State University’s Marcel Salathe studies the viral spread of information and the spread of real viruses.
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Brian Wheeler, BBC News
“Sickweather claims to be different because it operates in real time using data from social networks, rather than news reports or internet search terms, and is designed for use by individuals, rather than public health officials. It has already been dubbed “Facebook for hypochondriacs”.
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Emily P. Walker, MedPage Today
“State health departments have made steady progress in implementing electronic systems to track and share data on the prevalence of diseases, but states use varying tracking systems that may not work together as well as they should, according to a report from the CDC.
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Sarah Kessler, Mashable
“When the first cases of swine flu were detected in the spring of 2009, Twitter helped to inflame the panic that spread well ahead of the disease. The idea that anything useful could be mined from the flood of tweets reacting to the nascent threat was widely dismissed.
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John W. Loonsk, Healthcare IT News
“With the recent 10th anniversary of 9/11, there have been many personal and political remembrances of the events that scarred families and jarred the country that day. Health IT had its own significant events a decade ago, but they began about a week after 9/11 when letters with Anthrax in them were mailed.
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BBC News
“Two John Hopkins University computer scientists studied 1.5 million health-related tweets between May 2009 and October 2010.
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El Emam K et al, J Am Med Inform Assoc, 18(3)
Background
Providers have been reluctant to disclose patient data for public-health purposes. Even if patient privacy is ensured, the desire to protect provider confidentiality has been an important driver of this reluctance.
Methods
Six requirements for a surveillance protocol were defined that satisfy the confidentiality needs of providers and ensure utility to public health. The authors developed a secure multi-party computation protocol using the Paillier cryptosystem to allow the disclosure of stratified case counts and denominators to meet these requirements. The authors evaluated the protocol in a simulated environment on its computation performance and ability to detect disease outbreak clusters.
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Neil Versel, InformationWeek
“Sometimes forgotten in the rush to install electronic health records (EHRs) is that improving population and public health is a major goal of the federal meaningful use EHR incentive program. But many in the public health community are counting on greater EHR adoption and interoperability among physicians and hospitals to help identify and respond to future disease outbreaks, according to a top government health IT official.
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Stephen Robinson, GP Online
“Demand from pathfinder GP consortia to pioneer a novel software tool designed to cut urgent care admissions has outstripped a DoH target four-fold.
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PRWeb
“Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC), one of the nation’s leading public health and Health Information Exchange (HIE) organizations, has formed a Public Health Practice group. The goals of the group are to elevate STC’s reputation as a leader in public health, to support state, local, and national public health entities through assessments and studies, and to research and identify emerging public health business practices.
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Rupert Neate, Telegraph.co.uk
“Yusuf Ibrahim’s computer screen is awash with colourful maps and charts. From his desk in downtown Nairobi, Ibrahim can track outbreaks of deadly diseases and keep on eye on the progress of potentially tricky pregnancies. “With the touch of a button I can see what’s going on across the country in real-time,” Ibrahim said. “It is amazing.”
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SciDev.net
“The mobile phone can be handy in tracking outbreaks of communicable diseases in rural areas, according to pilot studies carried out by a global consortium in Sri Lanka and India’s Tamil Nadu state.
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Neil Versel, FierceEMR
“Recent flooding in Rhode Island illustrated why public-health officials are excited about the potential EMRs represent to improve disease surveillance and disaster response.
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Brownstein JS et al, N Engl J Med, 362(18)
The widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated forms of information technology has paralleled the increase in rapid and far-reaching international travel. The emergence and global spread of the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus illustrated not only the hazards of an interconnected world, but also the powerful role of new methods for detecting, tracking, and responding to infectious diseases.
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Collier, Nigel, Journal of Biomedical Semantics, 1(1)
Background
Accurate and timely detection of public health events of international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response and save lives. Novel event-based methods that use the World Wide Web as a signal source offer potential to extend health surveillance into areas where traditional indicator networks are lacking. In this paper we address the issue of systematically evaluating online health news to support automatic alerting using daily disease-country counts text mined from real world data using BioCaster. For 18 data sets produced by BioCaster, we compare 5 aberration detection algorithms (EARS C2, C3, W2, F-statistic and EWMA) for performance against expert moderated ProMED-mail postings.
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Francisco J Grajales III
“With the H1N1 Pandemic still fresh in our minds, the Winter Olympics have zeroed the spotlight on Vancouver. With 70,000 visitors per day, 5,000 athletes and staff, 1,350 Paralympic athletes, 10,000 media, 25,000 volunteers, and 8,000 security personnel, a single disease outbreak can become catastrophic. Historically, mass gatherings have been particularly sensitive to vector outbreaks.
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Fiona Isaacson, The Peterborough Examiner
“The interim head of eHealth Ontario was in Peterborough yesterday to see how local family doctors are using electronic medical health records to determine which of their patients fall into high priority groups for the H1N1 vaccine.
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