There’s an interesting article on FastCompany.com about the different ways to track the spread of the H1N1 flu. In particular the article focuses on Google Flu Trends, which looks at the number of searches for flu-related keywords to gauge how different areas have been hit, and GE’s electronic medical records system, which have the ability to anonymously aggregate data.
Apparently just last month the CDC chose to use the GE reports as part of its H1N1 monitoring. It works like this:
Daily reports upload from GE Healthcare’s Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a repository designed with HIPAA-compliance parameters, of anonymous clinical data and best practices. Participating physicians automatically contribute de-identified data to MQIC each day through normal use of GE’s Centricity EMR when they document information collected during patient visits to physician offices and clinics. Operated by GE Clinical Data Services, which also provides research and analytical services, the MQIC database is growing at a rate of nearly 30 percent each year. In peer-reviewed studies the database has been validated as representative of demographic and co-morbidity averages in the U.S. population1.