Privacy groups request details on Google Flu tracker

“Two not-for-profit privacy rights organizations have called on search engine giant Google to disclose the underlying methodology it uses in its new Google Flu Trends. Google said in a post on its official blog earlier this month that it put a team to work last year to “accurately model real-world phenomena using patterns in search queries,” including public health applications.”
Article
Joseph Conn, Modern Healthcare, 17 November 2008

Google Flu Trends And The Forgotten Facebook Lexicon

“We all heard about Google Flu Trends which was released this week which showed some impressive relationships to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
This got me thinking about a feature released by Facebook on April 15th 2008 called Facebook Lexicon. What’s that? No, I wouldn’t expect you to know as it received so little press that you probably missed it. So, what does it do? Unlike Google Trends or Technorati which can be used for trending keywords in search, websites or blogs, Lexicon shows trends on the public and semi-public forums across Facebook (also known as Walls). OK, so why are you telling me this?”
Article
Mark Hawker, Mark My Words, 14 November 2008

Flu-oogle

“The world’s favorite search engine launched a unique application today — and while it will really help the professionals, to me it’s both fascinating, and a little creepy!”
Article
Trisha Torrey, About.com Patient Empowerment, 12 November 2008

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

“I am currently in a mild state of shock. A couple of years ago - when Google.org was just created and Larry Brilliant was appointed CEO of Google.org, I sent him a preprint of my research on the correlation of searches on Google and Flu symptoms (published in 2006 here: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1839505). My hope was that a visionary guy like Larry would be open to a collaboration to explore my idea, the correlation between Internet searches and disease outbreaks (most notably influenza). I was also hoping that Google.org would perhaps be open to fund this project, or to share data.”
Article
Gunther Eysenbach’s random research rants, 11 November 2008

Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread

“There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats. Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors.”
Article
Miguel Helft, The New York Times, 11 November 2008

Nation’s Only Citywide Electronic Health Information Exchange: Improving Health And Lowering Costs

“Across the nation concerns about health-care quality and costs are growing. For the first time, both candidates aspiring to the nation’s highest office are looking to greater reliance on electronic medical records as critical to any remedy.”
Article
Science Daily, 15 October 2008

State Alliance calls for state action on healthcare IT

“The State Alliance for e-Health, made up of governors and state officials from across the country, is calling on states to support e-prescribing and address medical privacy and security issues in order to boost healthcare IT.”
Article
Bernie Monegain, Healthcare IT News, 23 September 2008

Group launches online Zip code atlas of population health

“A public health organization will launch an online database this fall that could help forecast the demand for health care services in specific locations for chronic conditions including diabetes, obesity, and HIV.
The National Minority Quality Forum has created the �Zip Code Analysis Project� to collect data on disease activity among both general and minority populations by postal code.”
Article
Kathryn Foxhall, Government Health IT, 18 September 2008

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

Nevada to adopt IT-driven health surveillance system

“The Nevada State Health Division plans to implement a community health surveillance system that covers the state’s 2.5 million people.”
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 26 August 2008

HealthMap website identifies disease outbreaks earlier than WHO

“It culls through new websites, public health list servs, the World Health Organizations’ online pages, and other sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on.
“We were originally thinking about how we could expand disease surveillance and pick up outbreaks earlier than traditional methods,” Discovery News quoted John Brownstein of Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston, who created HealthMap in September of 2006 with Clark Friefeld, a software developer at Harvard Medical School, as saying.”
Article
NewKerala, 21 July 2008

Internet may help track infectious disease outbreaks

“Internet discussion forums, listservs, and online news outlets could be an informative source of information on disease outbreaks, according to researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School.”
Article
Malaysia Sun, 8 July 2008

Fort Detrick unit to track diseases that affect U.S.

“A military unit that has tracked diseases threatening U.S. forces overseas for more than a half-century will now assess infections that could endanger civilians at home, too, officials announced yesterday at a dedication ceremony.”
Article
Jonathan Bor, Baltimore Sun, 3 July 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

Award for Open Source Application for Analysing Health Data

“Health Atlas Ireland, an Open Source application to analyse health related datasets using geographical information systems (GIS) and statistical software, was one of twenty projects that were given the ‘Prime Minister Public Service Excellence Award’. The awards were handed out last month by Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern.”
Article
eHealthNews.eu, 2 June 2008

MADE IN IBM LABS: New Data Sharing Technology Speeds International Collaboration to Identify and Respond to Infectious Diseases

“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
CNN Money, 2 June 2008

Introducing EPSDT+ a Medicaid Solution from STC

Developed in collaboration with Washington D.C. Department of Health (DOH) officials to exceed Medicaid’s EPSDT reporting requirements.
Scientific Technologies Corporation a public health information company will be implementing a newly redesigned Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment (EPSDT) solution in the first week of June 2008. This solution was designed to meet and exceed the needs of Washington D.C.’s Medicaid reporting requirements.
EPSDT+ is designed to to provide a secure, web-based solution that will enhance state ablities to document child wellness visits. It is anticiapted that over 800 providers, D.C. DOH, and Managed Care Organization officials will be accessing the system to monitor patient visits between the ages of 0 - 21 years of age who fall under the Medicaid EPSDT program.
Information
STC

Experts say ’secondary use’ of data could prove primary

“To overcome elusive ROI figures on electronic medical record projects, vendors have been touting the value of digitized data for secondary uses such as drug recall notification and post-release pharmaceutical studies.
But as a panel of experts assembled in the nation’s capital pointed out on Monday, calling those applications “secondary” betrays a limiting perspective on technology.”
Article
Jack Beaudoin, Healthcare IT News, 6 May 2008

Trust uses IT to help manage �superbugs�

“IT which reduces infection control alert times from six hours to six seconds is being deployed to help in the battle against �superbugs� at Wigan Wrightington and Leigh NHS Trust in North-west England.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 16 April 2008

Using IT to Fight Infections

“One of the most significant advances information technology has brought to health care is the development of systems that provide meaningful, actionable data that speed the process of identifying, treating or preventing a host of conditions. Recent additions to this type of technology are surveillance systems that can effectively track health care-associated infections.”
Article
Kathy L. Warye, HHNMostWired, 16 April 2008

DOD to create health surveillance center

“The Military Health System is combining a number of health information technology systems and employees into a single organization to promote the health of military personnel.”
Article
Peter Buxbaum, Government Health IT, 13 March 2008

Regenstrief Institute wins CDC contract, funding for informatics research

“The Centers for Disease Control has awarded the Regenstrief Institute at the Indiana University School of Medicine a $2.6 million contract to improve rapid response and emergency management of infectious disease outbreaks.
The funding will allow researchers from the Regenstrief Institute to develop public health informatics solutions to combat outbreaks of such public health hazards as anthrax, plague and other infectious diseases.”
Article
Richard Pizzi, Healthcare IT News, 12 March 2008

SSHA marks its past by looking forward

“Ontario’s Smart System for Health Agency marked its five-year anniversary this week by laying out its blueprint for the future. The strategic plan, among other things, presents strategies aimed at fostering the growth of electronic communication between practitioners, enabling increased use of electronic patient health records, and helping to avert any future pandemic outbreaks.”
Article
Greg Enright, InterGovWorld.com, 6 March 2008

Military Health System, CDC, join to track disease outbreaks

“The Military Health System and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are collaborating on a project through which CDC uses data from military sick calls to track outbreaks of infectious diseases.”
Article
Peter Buxbaum, Government Health IT, 6 March 2008

HealthMap: Global Infectious Disease Monitoring through Automated Classification and Visualization of Internet Media Reports

“Objective
Unstructured electronic information sources, such as news reports, are proving to be valuable inputs for public health surveillance. However, staying abreast of current disease outbreaks requires scouring a continually growing number of disparate news sources and alert services, resulting in information overload. Our objective is to address this challenge through the HealthMap.org Web application, an automated system for querying, filtering, integrating and visualizing unstructured reports on disease outbreaks.
Conclusion
HealthMap is a useful free and open resource employing text-processing algorithms to identify important disease outbreak information through a user-friendly interface.”
Abstract
Clark C. Freifeld, Kenneth D. Mandl, Ben Y. Reis and John S. Brownstein, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 15, Issue 2, March-April 2008, Pages 150-157, doi:10.1197/jamia.M2544

Bridging Radiology and Public Health: The Emerging Field of Radiologic Public Health Informatics

“Radiology and public health have an emerging opportunity to collaborate, in which radiology�s vast supply of imaging data can be integrated into public health information systems for epidemiologic assessments and responses to population health problems. Fueling the linkage of radiology and public health include (i) the transition from analog film to digital formats, enabling flexible use of radiologic data; (ii) radiology�s role in imaging across nearly all medical and surgical subspecialties, which establishes a foundation for a consolidated and uniform database of images and reports for public health use; and (iii) the use of radiologic data to characterize disease patterns in a population occupying a geographic area at one time and to characterize disease progression over time via follow-up examinations. The backbone for this integration is through informatics projects such as Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and RadLex constructing terminology libraries and ontologies, as well as algorithms integrating data from the electronic health record and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine Structured Reporting. Radiology�s role in public health is being tested in disease surveillance systems for outbreak detection and bioterrorism, such as the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics. Challenges for radiologic public health informatics include refining the systems and user interfaces, adhering to privacy regulations, and strengthening collaborative relations among stakeholders, including radiologists and public health officials. Linking radiology with public health, radiologic public health informatics is a promising avenue through which radiology can contribute to public health decision making and health policy.”
Abstract
Daniel J. Mollura, John A. Carrino, Diane L. Matuszak, Zaruhi R. Mnatsakanyan, John Eng, Protagoras Cutchis, Steven M. Babin, Carol Sniegoski and Joseph S. Lombardo, Journal of the American College of Radiology, Volume 5, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 174-181, doi:10.1016/j.jacr.2007.08.020

The Healthcare Challenge

Last week the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has declared Health informatics as one of the grand engineering challenges of our time.
They list a number of aspects that are part of that challenge, to start with interoperability and medical records. Their next comment is on the availability of information to professionals: “Doctors suffering from information overload need systematic electronic systems for finding information to treat specific patients and decision support systems to offer �just in time, just for me� advice at the point of care“. This sounds very much like the inventories and knowledge centres ICMCC has been focusing on during the almost 4 years of its existence.”
Article
Lodewijk Bos, ICMCC Blog, 20 February 2008

The Healthcare Challenge

Last week the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has declared Health Informatics as one of the grand engineering challenges of our time.
They list a number of aspects that are part of that challenge, to start with interoperability and medical records. Their next comment is on the availability of information to professionals: “Doctors suffering from information overload need systematic electronic systems for finding information to treat specific patients and decision support systems to offer �just in time, just for me� advice at the point of care“. This sounds very much like the inventories and knowledge centres ICMCC has been focusing on during the almost 4 years of its existence.
Monitoring information is mentioned next as one of the tools to improve healthcare. I should have been presenting at the German KIS meeting today, but due to medical problems I was unable to attend. I was supposed to talk about “Mobile devices from a patient viewpoint” and one of the issues I wanted to raise was the fact that these devices should be unobtrusive, easy to handle and if possible self-explanatory. The NAE even completely focuses on micro technology and interoperability once more is a key element: “Seamlessly integrating the input from such devices into a health informatics system raises the networking challenge to a new level“.
In the next part of their declaration the focus changes to public health emergencies, firstly the environmental monitoring to signal possible chemical and biological attacks, followed by a large chapter on disease surveillance to tackle pandemics, one of the other focussing points in the ICMCC history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Electronic lab reporting said to be more thorough than paper systems

“The use of electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) produces more complete and more timely disease surveillance than the current reporting standard of paper-based notification by doctors, hospitals and laboratories, according to a new study conducted by the Regenstrief Institute and the Indiana University School of Medicine.”
Article
Heather B. Hayes, Government Health IT, 23 January 2008

Improving Disease Reporting by Clinicians: The Effect of an Internet-Based Intervention

“Objectives: Disease surveillance by clinicians is critical to public health activities, yet studies have demonstrated significant underreporting of reportable diseases by clinicians. We sought to determine whether an intervention utilizing electronic media increases public health reporting by clinicians.
Results: E-mails were sent to more than 16500 clinicians and administrative personnel at five hospitals on each of three occasions. The Web site received 866 visits, and the handheld computer program was downloaded 130 times. Intervention hospitals had a mean increase of 5.6 reports, whereas control hospitals had a mean decrease of 3.0 reports (P = .02).
Conclusions: The electronic information-based intervention led to a significant increase in clinician reporting of reportable diseases. Considering the ease and low cost of implementing such programs, they are an attractive method for increasing clinician reporting of public health conditions.”
Abstract
Lawrence D. Ward; C. Victor Spain; Mindy J. Perilla; Knashawn H. Morales; Darren R. Linkin, Journal of Public Health Management & Practice. 14(1):56-61, January/February 2008