White Plains CitizeNetReporter - Bioterrorism Alert System

Anonymous writes "If there were a bioterrorism attack anywhere in the country, doctors would be at the front lines of response. But doctors in Westchester County now have one major advantage. As of January 2003, they now are part of a real-time automated data feed that tracks and analyzes the early symptoms of a would-be bioterrorism outbreak as exhibited by patients and analyzed by county health officials on a daily basis.

At the request of the Westchester County Department of Health (WCDH), the four-hospital Stellaris Health Network has successfully developed and implemented its Health Alert Network, an early-warning system to address bioterrorism threats via a real-time data feed from local hospitals concerning admitted and emergency-room patients that could be monitored to indicate a problem. Stellaris, the parent company and information technology coordinator of Lawrence Hospital Center in Bronxville, Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in Sleepy Hollow and White Plains Hospital Center in White Plains, was a logical choice to be the front-runners of such a system because with a single data feed it could sample four different geographical locations.

Shortly after the 9/11 terrorism attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the WCDH, under the leadership of Renee O’Rourke, Project Leader with the Department of Health,
approached Stellaris asking for help in coordinating such a surveillance system. Stellaris and county information technology officials met several times during the fall of 2001. Initially, the viability of such a data feed was questionable, says Eran Marom, Stellaris’ Vice President and Chief Information Officer.

“We did not think we were tracking the type of data one would be looking for such a system,” Marom says, explaining that in the end no additional patient information had to be collected, but only the way in which the system reported that information would be changed.

Stellaris’ technical staff then went to work to see whether such a system could be extracted from the hospital network as it existed, how it could be fed to the alert system, and at what frequency. “As the meetings progressed, we started to believe that this was doable,” says Marom.

The result: the county is now tracking and analyzing emergency-room data for four primary syndromes which could be indicators of communicable disease or virus: fever and flu, respiratory problems, diarrhea and vomiting. In addition to providing automatic daily notification to WCDH staff, the county also notifies the resulting analysis to local emergency rooms and other interested parties throughout Westchester County.

But for the data feed to mean anything, the data behind it has to be accurate. Dan Blum, Stellaris’ Vice President of Operations, contacted the emergency room managers of all four Stellaris network hospitals and was assured that the collected data indeed is entered accurately and that – even though it may not indicate a definitive patient diagnosis – it is the best approximation at the time of a patient’s arrival. “This assurance allowed us to gain a level of confidence in what we were offering the county,” says Blum.

“We were also concerned about patient confidentiality,” says Sharon Lucian, Stellaris Vice President and Privacy Officer. Although the Department of Health is considered a government entity that is allowed access to protected health information, Stellaris was uneasy about releasing patient information for this particular purpose. In the end, it was agreed that no information identifying a specific patient would be exchanged as part of the system.

So far, the early-warning system is operating consistently and reliably but, thankfully, has not yet identified any major spike requiring an alarm. “We will be working to further enhance and improve our surveillance activities, including expansion of hospitals reporting data, surveillance of outpatient data and automation,” says O’Rourke.

Indeed, Stellaris and its four-hospital network are on the cutting edge of the kind of surveillance technologies hospitals nationwide plan to implement, replacing more antiquated methods of patient information recording and databases and linking state and federal health officials -- all in an attempt to thwart a potential mass bioterrorism outbreak.

Stellaris Health Network is based in Armonk, New York.

To find out more information, please contact Eran Marom at 914-242-7678 or by e-mail at emarom@stellarishealth.org.
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