Spotting disease trends

A bio-surveillance system that provides healthcare information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been implemented at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston. The application provides automatic updates every 15 minutes to the CDC, containing data that could be crucial to identifying disease trends early.

Beth Israel Deaconess, which is one of 10 hospitals in the United States that were asked to provide medical information around the clock, is part of CareGroup HealthCare System, a delivery network that includes several other hospitals in New England as well as many ambulatory clinical practices.

According to CareGroup CIO John Halamka, Beth Israel Deaconess was chosen to initiate the data streaming project because it's a major monitoring center for Boston. The system is built on the CACHE post-relational database from InterSystems.

The hospital's CACHE-based Emergency ED Dashboard solution feeds the bio-surveillance application, which in turn provides emergency department (ED) data, as well as hospitalwide statistics to the CDC every 15 minutes. The implementation, which began with installation of a secure CDC server in the hospital's data center, went live in December 2005, within the deadline set by the CDC.

Halamka explains, "Information is encrypted based on the rigorous security requirements of the CDC and transmitted over the Web. This information is not specific to any individual and no names or patient identification are provided in the data stream.

"We transmit information such as the complaint and diagnosis, location in the geographic area where the patient came from, and number of patients reporting with a specific complaint. As more healthcare providers implement these streaming data feeds, information at a local and community level will be gathered countrywide. For the first time, we can analyze disease and trauma trends to spot patterns that can be the early warning of a potential pandemic or bio-terrorism attack."