Improving Epidemic Surveillance

By Dr. Charu Raheja

Traditionally, when an epidemic occurs, emergency rooms are responsible for reporting the suspected cases. This process takes time to uncover the epidemic because busy emergency rooms have to take extra steps to report suspected cases and they only see the cases in their location, making it difficult to diagnose an epidemic spreading over multiple locations.

To help diagnose epidemic issues faster, we have integrated an epidemic surveillance module to our Call Center Solution™ and Office Solution Software™ (now myTriageChecklist™). The additional capabilities serve as a valuable tool to help with disease tracking and epidemiology in the community. In this disease surveillance module, the system monitors phone calls taken by nurses, and reports guidelines and dispositions by zip code.

This gives clients the advantage of having suspected disease reports as part of the standard call process, which reduces the overall delays and steps involved. Further, a call center experiencing a high volume of calls or a group of physician practices can use the surveillance module to unveil alerts about a potential food borne illness outbreak or other epidemic in a much shorter time versus the current system. Multiple systems can also be tracked at the same time, which would allow us to observe epidemic signs in multiple locations.

Specific benefits of the surveillance module include:

• Establishing baseline data for future reference
• Ongoing reports of suspected cases
• Alerting of on-call epidemiologists regarding a possible epidemic
• Visual representation of disease clusters.

University Hospitals Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital Rainbow, Cleveland, OH, is testing a preliminary version of the disease surveillance module at its call center, which operates one of the country’s largest nurse triage programs.  Rainbow is consistently ranked one of America’s Best Children’s Hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. 

In addition to reporting suspected epidemic cases, the Call Center Solution is also capable of monitoring preprogrammed disease syndromes to look for specific outbreaks with greater accuracy and linking it to patient records via HIPAA compliant access.