GE Healthcare-hosted system gives CDC access to medical data from 14 million patients
The Centers for Disease Control have settled on a private, nationwide database with the electronic medical records of 14 million people run by General Electric in order to track potential outbreaks of the H1N1 virus.
Dr. Chris Crow, a family physician in Plano, Texas, said that in 10 years of practicing medicine, he’s never seen flu spread like it has in the past six weeks. Crow said he has been treating at least three new flu patients a day over that time.
“It has been absolutely incredible watching this,” said Crow, who runs Village Health Partners, a practice with 10 physicians. “When we had the initial H1N1 scare back in the spring, the county and state health departments were absolutely overwhelmed with the volume of calls and tests being reported to them.”
At that time, county and state officials were so overwhelmed, they told doctors to stop sending in test results because they couldn’t handle the volume, Crow said. But, that changed this week when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an effort to better and more easily track for H1N1, or Swine Flu , and other seasonal influenza activity throughout the United States.
The CDC said it is now tracking data on 14 million patients from physician practices and hospitals that is stored on a relational database hosted by GE Healthcare , General Electric Co.’s health care division. The data is submitted daily from physician’s offices and hospitals that use GE’s electronic medical record (EMR) system. The data is then uploaded to GE Healthcare’s Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a database repository designed with HIPAA-compliance parameters of patient anonymity and best practices where it can be the subject of medical data queries.
The CDC can perform queries to look for flu-like symptoms being reported by physicians, and then disseminate the data for health care providers and local government officials throughout the country, who can alert businesses and others about flu outbreak hot spots.
The CDC also hopes its analysis of the data helps it better understand the characteristics of H1N1 outbreaks and to determine who is most at risk for developing complications from the virus.
Prior to implementing the new system, the CDC relied heavily on tracking insurance claims data, which could take days, if not weeks, to make its way to the agency’s medical staff for analysis.
“You not only want to get the data from here to there, but then you also have to say I need to normalize that data,” said Dr. Mark Dente, chief medical informatics officer for GE Healthcare IT. “For example, if one doctor says hypertension, another says HTN and someone else says high blood pressure, it all means the same thing when you enter a query against the data.”
According to the CDC’s Office of Program Grant Officials, the CDC selected GE Healthcare’s system for the project due to the database’s built-in reporting capabilities.
The CDC has traditionally compiled data collected from insurance claims, a process that can take weeks or months to complete.
Crow’s practice has used GE’s Centricity electronic medical record system , for six years, so when the CDC program was launched he was automatically allowed access to the query engine that accessed data on the patents in the national GE records program.
Like Crow, all participating physicians automatically contribute data collected during patient cisits to MQIC each day through normal use of GE’s Centricity EMR system. The information aggregated by MQIC has no personal patient information, so patient privacy is not an issue.
Crow said he has been using MQIC aggregated data to give his own physicians feedback based on evidence-based guidelines and benchmarks provided by the National Committee of Quality Assurances – a standardization organization for clinical care for disease management.
Crow said now that the CDC also has access to the MQIC database, they will be able to track clinical symptoms such as fever, nausea and chills, prescriptions written, and vaccination rates, as well as variables such as procedures performed, pregnancy and patient age, within 24 hours of being compiled in thousands of participating doctors’ offices across the country.
“This is monumental because they’re taking my and other doctor’s data every day and looking for clues for new flu cases, such as fever … diagnosing codes and testing results,” Crow said. “This is going to allow the CDC to have the daily update for what’s going on for 14 million patients, which is what, 14% of the country?”
Once the CDC can spot regional upticks in flu cases, it can then send out alerts to physicians and businesses signed up for CDC flu alerts who can then take precautions against spreading the illness, Dente said.
“In terms of physicians, at the very beginning this allows you to suspect the flu before you otherwise might. From a patient standpoint, it alerts them to come in sooner. Getting in sooner can help the symptoms as well as the duration of the illness by using anti-virals that are out there today,” Crow said.
