CDC begins to collect flu data through NHIN
By Mary Mosquera
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has begun to receive public health reports about cases of H1N1 flu from New York, Indiana and Washington states through the nationwide health information network (NHIN) system.
Dr. Charles Magruder, senior advisor for health information exchange at CDC’s National Center for Public Health Informatics, said the three states’ health departments are linked to CDC through the Connect gateway, health information exchange software developed by a handful of federal agencies.
Connect allows organizations to share health information according to the standards and formats developed for the NHIN. The state agencies use it to relay summarized reports to CDC about incidents of H1N1 flu.
“Now the CDC has the capability to summarize all that summarized, de-identified H1N1 data at the federal level to further examine that,” Magruder said.
He spoke at a demonstration of the project Sept. 24 during Health IT Week sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). HIMSS also owns Government Health IT.
The state health departments electronically collect patient-level flu data from emergency departments and physicians through the assistance of health information exchanges, which can convert clinical information into a standard format.
The data flow not only from the states but from CDC back to the state health departments, he said. The use of health IT in this manner helps foster public health situational awareness, Magruder noted.
“If we see something of concern, we have an alert network by which we can take the information that we have, and again take it through a standardized process, and inform state health departments and other public health organizations of our findings so they can take quick action,” Magruder said.
Using live data, Magruder demonstrated an interactive map that uses a color-coding scheme to show the number of H1N1 cases across the three states. The map showed a concentration of cases in Spokane and Yakima, Wash.
The map also has the ability to illustrate flu cases nationally or at the local level by demographic variables, over time and across geography, Magruder said.
