Facebook app to help track how viruses spread
Molly Merrill, Healthcare IT News
“A new Facebook application, developed in a Tel Aviv University (TAU) lab, is poised to serve as a better indicator of how infections spread among populations.
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Infectious Diseases
Using Twitter to track flu outbreaks
Brian Mossop, The Decision Tree
“When public health officials track the outbreak of a virus, like H1N1, it takes time to get the story right. They have to collect and assemble data from institutions scattered across the country, a process that can be, well, slow.
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Data-driven approach for creating synthetic electronic medical records
Buczak AL et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 10
Background
New algorithms for disease outbreak detection are being developed to take advantage of full electronic medical records (EMRs) that contain a wealth of patient information. However, due to privacy concerns, even anonymized EMRs cannot be shared among researchers, resulting in great difficulty in comparing the effectiveness of these algorithms. To bridge the gap between novel bio-surveillance algorithms operating on full EMRs and the lack of non-identifiable EMR data, a method for generating complete and synthetic EMRs was developed.
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Data mining of hospital information can help identify MDROs: Asolva
The Medical News
“All hospitals, even small ones, contain huge amounts of data in paper and electronic records, often contained in separate departments or software applications.
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CASE: a framework for computer supported outbreak detection
Cakici, Baki et al, BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 10(1)
Background
In computer supported outbreak detection, a statistical method is applied to a collection of cases to detect any excess cases for a particular disease. Whether a detected aberration is a true outbreak is decided by a human expert. We present a technical framework designed and implemented at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control for computer supported outbreak detection, where a database of case reports for a large number of infectious diseases can be processed using one or more statistical methods selected by the user.
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How to fill the gaps in global clinical research networks
Jeff Blander, SciDev Net
“Globally, just ten per cent of medical research and discovery budgets target the 80 per cent of people who live on less than US$10 a day.
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Researchers turn cell phones into fluorescent microscopes
Science Blog
“Berkeley – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are proving that a camera phone can capture far more than photos of people or pets at play. They have now developed a cell phone microscope, or CellScope, that not only takes color images of malaria parasites, but of tuberculosis bacteria labeled with fluorescent markers.
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Hospital Mobile Phones ‘Superbug’ Scare
ScienceDaily
“Mobile phone handsets belonging to hospital workers are covered in bacteria including the ’superbug’, MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).
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Phones against infections
“Advanced imaging technology has been installed in a mobile telephone that can be used in blood tests for infectious diseases.”
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Epidemic surveillance under open source
“Utah will soon implement a new infectious disease reporting system licensed under the Affero GPL.”
Article
Dana Blankenhorn, ZDNet Healthcare, 16 September 2008
Made in IBM Labs: New Data Sharing Technology
“IBM, in collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) Global Health and Security Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), has created a unique technology that standardizes the method of sharing health information and automates the analysis of infectious disease outbreaks, in order to help contain diseases and minimize their impact.”
Article
eHealth News.eu, 16 June 2008
Researchers Pilot New Electronic System For Infectious Illness
“Researchers at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Harvard Medical School, Atrius Health, and the Massachusetts Department of Public Health have created and tested a set of computer programs that use electronic medical records to help clinicians detect contagious illness and automatically report them to public health departments.”
Article
Science Daily, 10 April 2008
SVH uses telemedicine to fight infection
“Partnering with Dr. Javeed Siddiqui of UC Davis Medical Center, the staff at Sonoma Valley Hospital is routinely able to get expert opinion on infection cases using the state of the art technology.”
Article
Emily Charrier, Sonoma Index-Tribune, 27 March 2008
